Cod Almighty | Diary

Enthusiasm is a necessary but not a sufficient condition

13 October 2015

Andy Warrington, in case you had forgotten (and Middle-Aged Diary had), is the Mariners' goalkeeping coach. Yesterday, he was also the man being put forward to explain the latest thinking in the Blundell Park boot room. That may be because Dave Moore is busy tending to Jon-Paul Pittman, Josh Gowling and Gregor Robertson ahead of tonight's game at home to Halifax.

It may also be because Chris Doig is busy reminding new loan signing Conor Townsend where the toilets are. Reminding, as you will recall Townsend was with us in 2011-12, even winning a young player of the season award despite Hull remaining his parent club. Since then, Townsend has had loan spells at Chesterfield, Carlisle, Dundee United and Scunthorpe. For no club has he made more appearances than the 27 he made for the Mariners, so we can hope he is eager to prove himself, all over again, tonight.

Warrington's promotion to club spokesperson may be because Paul Hurst is thinking up new reasons why Ben Tomlinson is our best option among the strikers available to us. For one of the things that Warrington has been asked to share is that we are in talks with Barnet over extending Tomlinson's loan. Pádraig Amond, we must conclude, was also unavailable for comment.

After the win over Gateshead, Paul Hurst told us that Town's league position had improved since he broke up the Amond/Omar Bogle partnership. That's a dodgy use of statistics, as league position is dependent on factors outside our control (unless of course we had cunningly lent Amond to one of our rivals, precipitating a poor run of form for them).

More reliable – but, to be honest, still pretty dodgy, statistically – is to look at points per game. My back-of-an-envelope exercise suggests we were getting 1.6 points a game until Tomlinon arrived at the club. Since, we have gone up to 1.67 points. However, the earlier figure of 1.6 points  includes the Torquay game in which Amond did not start but came on and helped rescue a point after we had been two goals down.

Older readers may remember the article in Sing When We're Fishing in which a contributor justified the works of Tony Rees to Mariner-dom by comparing to two decimal points the number of goals Town scored and the number of points they gained when Rees was or was not in the team. It is not an article that will feature in We are Town: Writing by Grimsby Fans 1970-2002, just as I'm confident this diary won't make the cut for any future collections. In themselves statistics prove nothing. It is a legitimate question to ask why Tomlinson is being preferred to Amond and it deserves a considered response rather than the pulling of statistical wool over our eyes.

Notwithstanding the caution from original/regular Diary yesterday, tonight we have an excellent opportunity to improve that points-per-game ratio. Halifax seem to be having a difficult 2015 and are currently bottom but one of the league with two wins to their name all season. Whoever is picked, it would be good to see them fill their boots.