Cod Almighty | Diary
No. 7:30
19 February 2015
Your original/regular Diary has been scrutinising utterances from three figures on the political right wing today, readers. Two have some sort of local connections; one is a Yorkie. But don't hold Jeremy Clarkson's Doncaster roots against him. Hold the fact that he's a massive pillock against him.
What? You're unaware of the raging manufactured controversy around the popular Top Gear racist's recent remarks on fish and chips? Whitby's are best, reckons Jezza. The Telewag has dutifully taken up cudgels on behalf of North East Lincs – or, more accurately, handed you the cudgels and subtly urged you to take them up. The irony, of course, being that most of the world-leading fish-and-chip emporiums of Grimmo and Meggies are run by immigrants from Yorkshire.
"What happens when renewable energy runs out?" Ah, Victoria Ayling, you've let the mask slip. You kip if you want to; some of us have children. The Cod is not for kipping, snoozing, sleepwalking, or burying our heads in the abundant sand of the Humber estuary.
And thirdly today, it's renowned communications guru Councillor John Shelton Fenty (Con), who can't understand why his opponents in the Peaks Parkway stadium debate seem to be winning the public relations battle...
Here at Cod Almighty, generally speaking, we try and keep a balanced view on Town's plans for a new ground. The CA team all have their own views, of course. But we're fairly open-minded. Many objections to the Peaks Parkway project – as with the Great Coates project before it – are predicated on ideas of football supporters' behaviour which – as with many ideas around North East Lincs – are out of date by at least three decades. The current debate seems to be all around the laying of flowers at graves being rudely interrupted by a chant of "You're gonna get your fucking head kicked in". It's not going to happen.
If anything, we're struggling to understand why more people aren't asking questions about the economics of the project. And now I'm talking about Town fans, not the professional nay-sayers who think our hometown could and should remain mired decades in the past, and can't even look at a pretty sign on Cleethorpes seafront, designed to post-1978 aesthetic tastes, without some kind of enormous screaming fit.
And when I say the economics of the project, I mean I don't want to see our football club rattling around in a quarter-full stadium that comes with a vast, unsustainable debt schedule that pulls us down into the abyss.
Proponents of the move say more fans will turn out at a new ground with unobstructed sightlines and a big car park. We're sceptical – but we're sure that, for GTFC to have built a business case for the stadium on the projected revenue from these extra fans, they must have extensively researched the preferences and intentions of local people, their perception of their local football club, and the experience of watching a match. We could be persuaded, if only they'd make that research public.
The spiel about conference facilities has been recited many times. We're sceptical – but we're sure that, for GTFC to have built a business case for the stadium on the projected revenue from these facilities, they must have extensively researched the local market for such a product. We could be persuaded, if only they'd make that research public.
We do our best to buy into this. We really do. Let's assume for a moment that the research has been done, and done properly; that all the sums add up; that the money is there to build the stadium, and the fans will come.
Even given all that, though, we just keep looking around at everything else the club has done in the last ten or twelve years, and – we don't want to think this, really we don't – but we just keep thinking it. Which is the more challenging to create: a sporting stadium to accommodate more than 10,000 spectators, or a sentence of English? And if there's an organisation that can't create a sentence of English, what will happen when it tries to create a stadium?