Cod Almighty | Diary

Monorail... monorail... MONORAIL!

7 September 2016

Well, there are a couple of things you thought would never happen. GTFC have secured an at least superficially credible development partner for the club's proposed new stadium, and John Fenty has appeared on Radio Humberside without sounding like a plonker.

Many Town fans hold a position on the new ground which might be summarised as "I don't care if the only pub is a Wacky Warehouse and the only beer is Coors Lite served at –273°C, I don't care if it takes another 90 minutes to get out of the car park after the game, I don't care who owns it, I don't care whether the club has done the sums right, or indeed at all, I don't care if it reeks of death, I don't care if the man who tells me it's the only option has demonstrably less than zero credibility, I've decided to believe everything he says because I've been bored into submission, I just want the thing built anywhere and anyhow, and that Cod Almighty bloke only goes to one game every four years so he can piss off".

If you're one of those fans, keep reading. Your original/regular Diary plans to get through my reservations as quickly as I can, and then I'll say something positive. It might mostly be about Tom Bolarinwa's performance for Town reserves in yesterday's 2-0 defeat by Chesterfield in the Central League, but hey. There's something here for you.

So look at this lot. They're "passionate about the sports" and "building our challenger brand". And despite speaking this sort of language – which, when you hear it at a meeting at work, makes you want to throw people out of windows – they want you to think they're rebels.

They use the word "misfits".

They're not misfits.

If they were misfits, they wouldn't have such nice hair. If they were misfits, they'd be listening to a rare Manic Street Preachers bootleg while drinking thistle tea and having razor blade tattoos. Or they'd be up in an attic, building an EM gauge replica of the Sleaford Avoiding Line. Or living on a diet of spring water, raw peas and Emily Dickinson poems. Or being hounded to their death by the Department for Work and Pensions. Something like that. In a world of zumba, Costa, Naked Attraction and selfie sticks, these people are not misfits. They're a perfect fit.

And if you want a stadium for this world, maybe they're a perfect fit for that too.

Town's non-chairman is now so deadly serious about all of this that he went mano a mano with his tormentor-in-chief David Burns on Radio Humberside this morning. The gist: Fentydome II will come complete with low-cost housing, community football pitches, health and well-being centres (not really sure what they are), "ancillary" retail (which I think means little shops instead of massive ones), and – drum roll, please! – a new ice arena (which is what skating rinks are called in a world of zumba, Costa, Naked Attraction and selfie sticks).

Chuck in the creation of 320 jobs, and that sounds a decent package. Assuming the jobs are any good.

Fenty came across reasonably well in the face of some potentially tricky questioning. Granted, I would have liked a little more on the selection process which led to the appointment of the Extreme people to develop his stately pleasure dome. Listeners would have been more convinced about his motives and sincerity, when explaining the provision of new walking and cycling routes, by a choice of words other than "hopefully that will satisfy some of the residents". But being critical about the running of the club carries with it a moral obligation to apportion credit on those sadly rare occasions when it's due. And that means apportioning some today.

So for a moment here I'll put on ice (heh!) my standing reservations about this project. You know what those are. The location. The process by which the location was determined. The design (a Grimsby Telegraph story today features an architect's impression of a stadium which I can only assume is not this one, as it implies that the number of stands will exceed two).

And I'll try and overcome the cynicism that's been dealt out to me during the past ten or a dozen years of disaster at my football club, and which only seemed to worsen after this summer's promotion (covert appointments, legal threats, the Mighty Mariner debacle, and the contempt for supporters shown by the club's official backing for B teams in both the FL Trophy and the Football League).

And I'll venture that if this all goes to plan – bearing in mind that this is a bigger 'if' than the biggest 'if' in the history of big 'if's – then it actually might not be a complete disaster.