Cod Almighty | Diary
There's a Jarman waiting on the bench
11 January 2016
Town are no more champions-elect because of a big win at Welling than you're the hardest kid on the street for kicking your little brother in the nuts. Nevertheless, Saturday's 4-0 romp in, um, some bit of London is just the tonic needed by Mariners fans and players alike after a challenging few days.
Conor Townsend went to Scunny and without his attacking gumption Town failed to find a way around the bloody bus parked in the box by Guiseley, the bloody bus-parking bastards. When Paul Hurst spent a day as odds-on favourite for the Notts County job – as we knew he would at some point, just not necessarily this time round – it seemed for an instant that the season was falling apart. Complex problems sometimes call for simple solutions, though, and just as your original/regular Diary is wont to take arms against a sea of troubles by simply going to the pub, Town responded to their difficult week by simply giving the ball to Pádraig Amond.
Similarly, I like to think Amond will be persuaded to sign a new contract simply because he's so touched that Cod Almighty always takes the trouble to get the accent right on the first 'a' in his forename. Granted, there are isolated instances when the world isn't quite that simple. I'll wake up the morning after a session on strong IPA to find that I'm still halfway through my life having achieved precisely bugger all, and Lenell John-Lewis will still leave for Newport County despite that lovely Christmas video Lloyd Griffith made with him.
When was the last time Town extended a player's contract before it ran out? Last summer John-Lewis was the exception and most of the club's 462 out-of-contract players renewed. And we're seeing the benefits of that on the pitch right now. Aren't we? But we were lucky really. Especially in the case of players like Shaun Pearson, who, like the Shop, had offers from the Football League. Supporters know this, and while Podge's hat-trick at Park View Road gave rise to glorious melody, there was a minor-key harmony asking: "Yeah, but we only gave him a one-year contract, didn't we?"
I'm not quite sure why GTFC are so reluctant to try and extend contracts during the season. I know men are supposed to be poor at multitasking. And admittedly, you look at a man like John Terry and you think his constant, pointless aggression is probably borne from his frustrated attempts to walk and talk at the same time. But I refuse to believe that the mighty Podge will be distracted from his epic goalscoring form on matchdays by half an hour on a Thursday afternoon weighing up whether another year in North East Lincs will be rendered more tolerable by a new, Operation Promotion-boosted contract and how much more Nando's he can buy with the proceeds.
So I expect it's that problem faced by all football clubs, but Town more than most: we don't know which division we'll be in next season, so we don't know how much money will be realistic to pay a player then. You might refuse to believe it beyond the wit of humanity to draw up a contract which simply provides for bigger wages conditionally in the event of promotion. But you'd be reckoning without the acumen of a club where a star striker missed a key match because nobody understood how the league's disciplinary system worked.
In other no-news-is-no-news news today, Grimsby fans have hit out at the Tinpot Football Conference for letting it rain, and Matt Dannatt of the Grimsby Telegraph says the Armand Gnanduillet thing is probably just made up (paraphrasing a bit there, sorry Matt), which is a shame, as there's nothing in life so much fun as when your actual football club signs an actual player in actual real life who you've probably signed on Football Manager just because you liked his name. See yers.