Cod Almighty | Diary

Keep it light

26 October 2015

Well, there's a result, eh. Town managed to shake off their initial sluggishness at Harrogate and John-Paul Pittman's sumptuous reverse hook pass to set up Town's fourth goal makes it into your original/regular Diary's book of bloody lovely. "Crikey almighty," observes John Moore wryly on the Mariners World commentary. It's not quite Huddersfield in '90-91 but if you want that standard of counterattacking you'll have to wait for Match of the Day 2 to come on the iPlayer and watch Steven Fletcher's goal for Sunderland against Newcastle yesterday. A pat on the head for the 900 or so Town fans who managed not to smash the place up, and a special well done to Joe Colbeck for managing not to get sent off.

The result over in beautiful Yorkshire takes the Mariners through to the FA Cup's first round proper or, to use its official title, the "who do you want, I want an away game against the team nearest wherever I live" round. And the FA Cup owes me one since Town stuffed it up against Salisbury the other year. Look out for the draw at the alarmingly unconventional hour of seven o'clock this evening.

Another potential benefit to the Mariners from the cup's fourth qualifying round is that our next opponents, Cheltenham Town, managed only a draw against Havant & Waterlooville. No, stay with me. It means they have to play a replay tomorrow night, leaving them only three days of recovery time before they travel to Blundell Park to face GTFC. OK, stop me, I'm clutching at straws.

Three days? Yep, it's another Friday nighter, boys and girls. GTFC's crack public relations team has worked hard over the years to sell the concept of a game of football taking place 19 hours before it should. In the run-up to the 2005-06 season the club switched three home matches to Friday nights (including one against Cheltenham), and two weeks later even tried to explain why. "Commercial reasons" were one factor, they said, citing a gate of more than 6,000 for a Friday nighter the previous season (again, versus Cheltenham), and then rather undermining their own argument by pointing out that 1,800 of those in attendance were kids who got in for free under a special Friday night 'get in for free' offer.

And don't even get me started on the time they claimed that a Friday kick-off against Oxford with an attendance of 4,777 had "proved to be a winner with fans", when the average gate for that season was 4,943. Oh, too late.

Meanwhile it has come to the attention of Cod Almighty that GTFC's crack public relations team has 'branded' the Cheltenham game 'Fright Night II' in some manner of Hallowe'en-related 'promotion', presumably with Richard Brodie pumpkin heads and themed catering ("Ha ha, you've made spooky tea that tastes like boiled green slime!" "What do you mean? This is just our usual tea!"). I feel I ought to be outraged in some way but I can't quite work it up this time.

True, this marketing initiative clashes clumsily with the return of Harry the Haddock, which the Mariners Trust scheduled ages ago for the same match. Also, Hallowe'en is fucking rubbish. But this is a match that has already been spoilt beyond redemption by its unnatural timetabling. If GTFC decided to switch to a 4-3-3, stop the match every five minutes to play adverts on the scoreboard, drop two leading goalscorers in favour of anonymous loanees, and play an entire Kasabian track to celebrate every completed pass, they could scarcely ruin the game any further than it has been ruined by being switched to a Friday night.

Still, while Town slug it out in the Conference for an nth successive year, and recent opponents like Bournemouth lord it up in the Premier League, there are some consolations. The bigger the leagues come, the harder the PR calamity makes you fall. Crikey almighty!