Cod Almighty | Diary

Surely that's a portcullis

5 December 2013

These are strange days in football. Belgium and Colombia are ranked in the top five national teams in the world. Arsenal are playing reasonably well before Christmas. After ten years of despair, Grimsby Town supporters are starting to hope their team loses instead of wins. And now a major shareholder is at it as well.

What? This: John Shelton Fenty wants his club to get knocked out of the FA Cup. "The dream ticket is to beat Northampton and then draw Manchester United away," the GTFC non-chairman tells the Grimsby Telegraph today. "Then we can bow out and concentrate on the other two jobs in hand – returning to the Football League and progressing in the FA Trophy again."

Some might say it's hardly surprising, given precisely this defeatist mentality, that Shelton's term of influence at Blundell Park has seen three relegations, financial ruin, a catastrophic succession of managerial hirings and firings, administrative blunder after blunder, regular humiliations by part-time opposition, and the longest spell without a win in the 135-year history of the club. To your optimistic original/regular Diary, though, it's exactly this imaginative approach to football that's needed for the club to recover from three relegations, financial ruin, a catastrophic succession of managerial hirings and firings, administrative blunder after blunder, regular humiliations by part-time opposition, and the longest spell without a win in the 135-year history of the club.

What is the purpose of the article? Well, the Telegraph has very usefully remembered that cup competitions involve prize money. Even without the realisation of Shelton's beautiful dream, the modicum of football fortune Town have experienced already this season has done a little to keep the wolves from the door. Let's pause here to enjoy an exquisite Fentyspeak neologism as the non-chairman speaks wistfully of the "gate uplift" witnessed in the recent FA Cup tie against Scunthorpe.

Lovely.

Heh heh heh.

So exactly how much money does the Telewag mean when it says "big money"? In the FA Cup, 35 grand for the wins and another 10 from the televising of this Saturday's second-round tie with Northampton. Then there's another £5,000 for beating Coalville in the FA Trophy. So far, then, fifty thousand quid. There'll be another £27k on top of that if we beat Northampton. Tidy.

But how far does that £50,000 impact upon the total debt of £3.8million run up by Councillor Fenty's club? Let's take a look!

Ah.

Well, perhaps the non-chairman was inspired by the recent ruse pulled off by his mates in the government and their mates in the energy companies. Remember? Instead of putting up prices by eight times the rate our wages are going up, they just put them up by five times instead, and presented it as a big win for the hard-hit consumer. And why not, eh? After all, 90 per cent of the way up shit creek is still 5 per cent better than 95 per cent of the way up shit creek.