Cod Almighty | Diary

Plinthy slaping

15 November 2013

Mardy Diary writes: Tuesday's diary excellently covered the issue of crowd violence and was followed up by a great piece on Too Good To Go Down about police treatment of fans. The SNOS has followed this up by... that's right, posting a video clip [video now removed] of the mid 90s rioting against Stoke on its YouTube channel. Nice work.

At best this is naïve; at worst it's – I don't know – incitement to riot? Either way it is yet another catastrophic communication fuck-up by our bumblingly incompetent club. Even if – and this seems to be the defence – even if it's to say "hey, the Scunthorpe pushy-shove isn't bad when you compare it to how it used to be, see?", it's still a bollocks.

I was at that Stoke game and there were scuffles inside and outside the ground. But if these were the "bad old days" I'm not sure they were any different to Burton about 20 years later. And it's not like it was a weekly occurrence back in 1990 anyway – the Stoke pushy-shove was pretty much a one-off, bar more of the same at their ground at the end of the season.

Regarding the Scunthorpe match, Humberside Police have now issued statements to "risk" fans asking them not to attend the match next Tuesday. That headline is a bit misleading really as it begs the response "oh, that should sort it, then". In reality they've issued letters to trouble-causers informing them that they won't get into the match even if they've got a ticket – although having police spotters at these sorts of games isn't unusual anyway.

In actual football news, Dayle Southwell has returned from his loan spell and will be kept at BP in the short term to cover for injuries. Dayle only played three times for Harrogate (scoring once) because of illness – a bit disappointing really, as it would've been nice for him to get a decent run of matches to show what he can do. Hopefully there'll be further chances for him as the season goes on.

That's it for the week. Apologies for the lack of match preview again – rest assured those responsible have been severely flogged. If you're lucky though, there may be a Postbag up this evening.

Have a good weekend, and don't go hitting other people because of football you daft buggers.