Cod Almighty | Diary

It's all random

18 January 2016

If any group of people connected with Grimsby Town Football Club is getting 'distracted' by the FA Trophy, it's not the players: it's the fans. Your original/regular Diary feels the pain of anyone with a non-refundable advance train ticket which becomes useless. But I never expected to see such desperation and near-hysteria generated by the issue of potential rescheduling for one Tuesday evening in Bromley.

So while the Mariners' Trophy business is over again for the time being, you can bet your bottom quid that some of the club's supporters won't be moving on quite so quickly. On the dubious basis that the more football you play in the FA Trophy, the worse you play football in the league, the need for our league rivals Cheltenham to play a Trophy replay is great news. But this would be reckoning without the nifty little shimmy our old friends from Gloucestershire have just pulled off to avoid a postponement of their own.

Eh? What? You heard. Rather than call off this Tuesday's Conference fixture against Kidderminster to accommodate their FA Trophy replay against Oxford City, Cheltenham have hit on the excellent ruse of fielding their first team against Kiddy and their reserves against Oxford the following evening, the crafty rotters. They've checked with the FA and it's all fine. Cheltenham have not broken any rules: they've just thought of a very clever way of keeping to the rules. And Town fans are certain to be furious about this because they didn't think of it first.

Or did we just think it would be a giggle if Cheltenham fans had useless non-refundable advance train tickets? I can't quite remember. I tend to think wanting there to be less football is quite a peculiar stance for a football fan, but what do I know.

Back in north-east Lincs, Paul Hursts has earned plaudits for the harmony and good spirit in his squad, even among the members of it who don't get to play very much. It's more than a little surprising, then, to see Jack Mackreth and Scott Brown frozen so far out that they don't even make the bench in a XVI that's heavily rotated for the Trophy. That's no Brown even with Craig Disley kept at home, and no Mackreth even with a right-back playing on the right wing. The manager has had "a couple of enquiries" for the redundant duo, he's told the Telegraph, but that's all he's told anyone. It's the sort of mystery to which supporters' only possible response is quite clearly to make up a rumour about an incident involving the training ground, someone's wife, a large vat of minestrone and the angry throwing of a shoe.

So prolific has Pádraig Amond become that his absence from the scoresheet against Weston-super-Mare on Saturday is still surprising even when you know he wasn't playing. Our very own fox in the box has been quite the hot topic these few days past, since Town fan and journo Tom Farmery highlighted his remarkable scoring exploits in the pages of a popular far-right pamphlet. The story has gone mildly viral, given a catchy angle in the nationals by the revelation that Amond's goals-to-minutes ratio or something is topped only by about four players in Europe this season, or something, and they're dead famous players who people with Sky Sports subscriptions will have heard of.

Another way the national media has given the story relevance to its perceived audience of plastic Premier consumers is to suggest that Amond could "do a Jamie Vardy". It's all a bit desperate given that Podge will turn 28 this year. Granted, Vardy was 25 when he joined Leicester City from Fleetwood, but c'mon. Next thing you'll be telling us Liam Hearn is attracting interest from Chelsea.

Last up today, then, transfer news and people saying things – which, let's face it, are fast becoming as much a spectator sport as the actual football. Once again, the story is that there's no story. Putative GTFC target Armand Gnanduillet is going to Leyton Orient and he who is Hursts sounds utterly fed up with the transfer market.

The story of the day, though, is surely the manager's astonishing assertion that "we haven't got a big enough squad to go on and try to win the league". I can't decide whether this is true or not. If it's true, it's a pretty damning admission – Hurst can hardly plead that he has lacked either the time or the funds to build such a squad. On the other hand, we have players of the calibre of Shaun Pearson and Jon-Paul Pittman on the bench. We have four senior central midfielders plus the excellent youth prospect Josh Venney. And we have four wingers, plus a spare right-back who the manager sometimes plays on the wing for a laugh.

So perhaps, rather than being not big enough, the squad is not good enough. It seems implausible given Town's late run of results. But we've eliminated the impossible, so who knows? Apart from that bloke who does Experimental 361, obviously, and Retro Diary. See you in west London for that May double-header.