Cod Almighty | Diary

Has George Clooney cut short his honeymoon to play Paul Futcher?

30 September 2014

Tonight, Town host Southport aiming to win three games in a row for the first time this season. If you have come here for team news, you really should know better.

However, one player who won't be involved is Ellis Humble, who has joined Cleethorpes Town on a month's loan. If this proves to be a significant step on a glorious career, your Middle-Aged Diary will be delighted.

Not because I know Humble, or have a particular admiration for his skills – I've never seen him play. However, his name goes before him. If he becomes as ubiquitous as, say, David Beckham was a decade ago, we can be confident we will be spared one trope of the modern celebrity interview. Ellis Humble, we can be sure, will never say he is humble when he means proud. If David Copperfield teaches us one thing, it must surely be to mistrust the person who describes themselves as "'umble".

Sorry, where were we? Ah yes, Southport, and if you are a slightly obsessive Town fan of a certain age, that means Paul Futcher, player-manager for the Sandgrounders between 1997 and 2000. During that time, he became the oldest player to appear in a Wembley final.

No doubt the observation has been made before, but the tale of how Futcher, his career apparently on its last legs, came to rescue our faltering third division promotion campaign is the stuff of a Hollywood movie. It could even just be a subplot in an epic, a film rather better than anything Sacha Baron Cohen is likely to put out in our name.

Start with Marc North missing a penalty to confirm Town's consecutive relegations down into the fourth division, and end with Jim Dobbin's 90th-minute winner at St James' Park. Along the way you have two middle-aged men sharing a caravan, Mark Lever as Bambi on skates, Alexander the Great, the enigma that was Neil Woods and an inflatable fish. I'm rubbish on actors, so after the marvellous response we had last week to the question about games where we robbed the opposition, I'll leave you to send in your casting suggestions.

Someone at Blundell Park is developing a certain flair for filming. This is a film that could (conceivably, in a parallel universe) be made.