Cod Almighty | Diary
Haddock for the Danelaw
9 July 2015
GRIMSBY Town has [sic] launched a search for investors to plug a funding hole in the club's £22-million stadium dream… Club director Stephen Marley will head up a working group to attract investment and will report back in three months.
Grimsby Telegraph, 26 March 2015
Three and a half months on from this bold promise, unless your original/regular Diary has missed it, there is no sign of a report from Marley's working group. It's also worth noting that Town's 'exclusivity agreement' with North East Lincolnshire Council – which was extended by six months last December, to allow the club to "fully explore its ambitions for the [Peaks Parkway] site and to submit a planning application" – has now expired, with no sign of a planning application being submitted.
What are we to assume? Pessimists and self-styled realists might conclude that the £16million-shaped gap in the Fentydome II finance is never going to be filled in 16 million years, and that the silence now emanating from Blundell Park marks the beginning of a long, painful climbdown. Users of rouge-tinted assistive optical apparatus will be wont to assume instead that there's a good and wholesome reason for Marley's group having missed its deadline and that Fentydome II remains very much on track. "The dog ate my investment report", perhaps.
Whatever we assume, it can – at least for the time being – be no more than an assumption. Why? Because the club hasn't given us the facts. And nobody in a position of influence seems to have asked for them, or asked why the club hasn't given us them when they promised they would.
Meanwhile, Steve Marsella – the goalkeeping coach and scout who joined Town amid a little flurry of excitement last October – has quietly left the club amid a flurry of nothing very much at all. How do we know? Only because of a brief aside on the BBC's Newport County web pages. I know a pattern emerging when I see one, and I know the sound of silence.
Anyone remember Town's exciting partnership with Hutchison Vale FC? No, thought not. "The Mariners have recently recruited striker Omar Ali from the Edinburgh club and hope to pick up some of their best youngsters in the future," declared the club's website back in 2008, alluding giddily to the emergence of Scotland international and Premier League star Darren Fletcher from the same club. What happened to Omar Ali? What happened to the link with Hutchison Vale? I know a pattern emerging when I see one, and I know the sound of silence.
Now, I expect the departure of a presumably part-time goalkeeping coach, and a link with a youth football club in a neighbouring country – and probably even issues like what really happened with the Jarvis sponsorship – will be of less ultimate significance than the issue of where the club plays its home games. But the handling of these matters has something in common with the communications vacuum surrounding Fentydome II. It's symptomatic of the way GTFC are quick and loud to share the first half of a story but so often leave the rest untold and forgotten.
In a town like Grimsby, where working people have been let down so often and for so long – by government, by companies, by our football club – we're understandably cynical about a lot of things. And if we're left to assume, because nobody's giving us the facts, we'll tend to assume the worst. Meanwhile, as John 'Tina' Fenty persists in his "there is no alternative" line on Peaks Parkway – which, incidentally, was the same line he took on Great Coates before it – North East Lincolnshire Council is busy exploring a series of alternatives. This one – as ever, and in stark contrast to Peter Sweeney – will run and run.
So the phoney war of pre-season has begun, with Cleethorpes-based Grimsby Town undertaking an arduous journey to Grimsby-based Cleethorpes Town. While last night's score at Bradley Community Stadium (now there's an idea) was a relatively modest 4-0, expectations will be in no way dampened by the list of scorers: Amond (2), Pittman and Bogle. POW.
And in an exciting development for 2015-16, our top local rag – surviving, remarkably, as a print daily where so many others have fallen – has got the hang of clickbait list posts, with a thoroughly modern "SEVEN things we learned from Grimsby Town's friendly at Clee Town" adorning the Telewag website today. Now, who says North East Lincolnshire is as much a psychological as a geographical cul-de-sac, with no inkling of how things are done in the wider world?