Cod Almighty | Diary

We wait on Hurst as Hurst waits on a new striker

22 July 2016

Retro Diary writes: Help, I’m in diary hell here. We’re supposed to be unveiling a striker today, and I can’t hit send until I know who it is. A few are saying Kayden Jackson from Barnsley – young, quick, and played all his proper football with Wrexham. I’m not going along with that until he signs. I’ve been caught out like that before. Whoever it is, it is said, should apparently be here in time for our second major test of the pre-season tomorrow. I’ll play for time – here we go.

The Hull City team which started last Friday’s match at Blundell Park was a strong one - very nearly the same team that took the field in the second division play-off final at Wembley two months earlier. Tom Huddlestone bossed the park in a way that I haven’t seen anybody do for a very long time, and the gulf in quality in the early stages was plain to see.

I’ve watched the tangle of legs that led to Moses Odubajo’s knee injury about 20 times now, and I still can’t work out whose fault it was. Probably nobody’s - just one of those things - although Danny Andrew exited the scene pretty sharpish just in case. The injury, which will keep Odubajo out of Premiership action until the New Year, stopped him from coming up against his older brother, Town’s Tom Bolarinwa, who didn’t come on to the field until the second half.

Such a shame, that. I can’t remember a Town player ever coming up against his own brother, unless some statto out there can put me right. Nor can I ever remember a team in all grey playing a team in all black (which, for those of you watching in black and white, er... oh yeah). Apart from the trim on town’s kit, of course, which is officially "teal". Now if you were under the impression that a teal was a kind of duck without much meat on it, let me tell you that teal is a sort of dark turquoise. Personally I put it with all those other colours that don’t really exist, like taupe, ecru and coral. Grey and teal - blimey – it’s no wonder someone got hurt.

When Huddlestone went off, Hull suddenly looked very ordinary indeed, and you thought they might not pose football’s behemoths quite so much of a problem after all. The injury didn’t help them - the third such blow in pre-season already for Hull. "I hate pre-season, and I hate pre-season friendlies", said Steve Bruce afterwards. Well piss off then, Steve, nobody made you come.

I didn’t go to Boston, but it seems from the reports that Tom Bolarinwa’s performance was the bright spot in another mediocre offering. Again, sticking the ball in the bag was the thing not happening. Although we’re making a huge leap forward today (apparently), without trying to rain on your strawberries, two strikers still isn’t enough. While Hursty has perfected the ability to tell us nothing about his transfer targets, we now infer from circumstantial evidence that he’s genuinely struggling with the whole thing. We now know, rather perplexingly, that Lenell was approached, and I have heard another believable rumour that no less than The Beast was the unnamed target that got away at the end of last week. Well they say stripes make you look slimmer, but on every other count the notion is quite alarming, not least because he misses the first three games of the season because of a retrospective red card earned by a horrific late stamp on Josh Gowling’s shin at Wembley.

Can’t we aim a bit higher than these guys? Really? Even if we spend some cash? Is there any Operation Promotion money left? Or we could just get Danny North back, whose contract with Shamrock Rovers has just been cancelled by mutual consent. Sadly though, he’s crocked for the time being.

As mentioned by Devon Diary yesterday, Nathan Arnold still has no club. This is most odd, and although it’s technically nothing to do with us any more, we’re left wondering whether this player who starred in arguably Town’s greatest moment in living memory intends to just drift ignominiously out of the game. On sort of the same subject, in this week’s Cleethorpes Chronicle, Peter Bore throws some light on the reasons behind his own decision to do exactly that, in what should have been his prime. “I just stopped enjoying it” he says, “I never felt there was much loyalty in the game”. “I got to 25 and realised I wasn’t going to be a millionaire and it was time to start a new career. I have no regrets – it’s life. I’ve not really thought about it since”. If you were wondering, Peter is now a Special Constable, also studying social work at Hull University, although he’s decided to get the boots back on and turn out for Cleethorpes Town this season.

The first thing to say is that for me, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Bore would never be a millionaire. He was very talented despite the odd mental aberration, and with a bit of hard work and one good season, advancement in football can be very rapid indeed, and rewards disproportionate. Secondly, you, me and most people would think that being a professional footballer was sufficiently life-defining that you’d milk it for all it was worth, in what is only, after all, a short career. The credibility alone should ensure that your after-football years would contain opportunities not available to the rest of us. Also, is there nothing in between broke and "millionaire"? At the end of the day there’s no legislating for someone’s state of mind – it’s their decision. It just makes you wonder how many unpaid coppers and jobbing barbers are flogging their arses along the breadline in their twenties, not being footballers because they simply don’t fancy it. I must say, I can’t really understand it.

Tomorrow it’s holidaymakers versus residents as we host Sheffield United. They’re expecting to bring up to 2,000 fans which seems a lot, but as one wag quipped, "it isn’t far from the Fitties". Of course that’s quite a meaningful observation on our Town’s geography. On a hot summer weekend there are quite possibly more fans of the two Sheffield clubs in Cleethorpes than there are Town fans, which should by rights bother us, but as far as I’m aware, never has. It’s probably because while tens of thousands of people from South Yorkshire flock to Cleethorpes every year, spending money as they go, never in my whole life have I ever known anyone from Cleethorpes go to Sheffield on holiday.

Maybe we’ll even get a few Wednesdayites in our end just to see the 'pigs' get a summer humbling. Or maybe they just won’t be arsed, and let’s face it, why would you - I wouldn’t be that excited about, for example, watching Wednesday play Scunny in a friendly.

Mike Bassett is the new England manager. And Boris Johnson is foreign secretary. No really. Hey we could swap ‘em round. They couldn’t be more useless and destructive than each other, surely.

Out into the world now, and Mike Bassett is the new England manager. And Boris Johnson is foreign secretary. No really. Hey we could swap ‘em round. They couldn’t be more useless and destructive than each other, surely.

Lastly, it seems that the final decision on the location for Town’s new stadium (or should I say the date at which the Council ignores the consultant’s findings) has slipped back to the end of August. Actually, rather like Hursty buying a centre forward, I’d rather the decision was right, than the wrong one was made too quickly. We all know what the right decision is, but it needs vision and bravery, which I have a strong feeling won’t be forthcoming. For me, it all depends on whether you take into consideration the views of the poor people who have to sit looking through the open corner at a field with a horse in it for the next hundred years, and whether you want the heart of your town to be a post-nuclear wilderness forever. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to eat humble pie on this subject, so come on, NELC you crazy visionaries, take a break from charging 30p for a piss down meggies and closing the paddling pool on the hottest day of the year, and do something monumental for the good of humanity, just for once.

No striker yet – you could die waiting - best hit ‘send’ I think.

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