Cod Almighty | Diary
That's one over the eye for Tillson
4 October 2016
Wicklow Diary writes: Experience an inexplicable shiver yesterday around lunchtime? Relax, it was just the FA Cup fourth qualifying round draw. Sixty-four hopeful minnows battling it out with the dream of a trip to Blundell Park for the first round proper next month.
It's unlikely that we or any of the sixty-four will make it to the final at Wembley in May. The prospect, though, is a useful example to demonstrate again how little the chief executive of the Football League, Shaun Harvey, understands, err, football. I've started to tune out of Harvey’s rubbish but I couldn’t help be irked by these comments yesterday.
"If we end up with two-non EFL clubs in the [Football League Trophy] final, I suspect it will be disappointing for the 48 clubs in League One and League Two. The same question is not always asked of the Football Association, whether they would be disappointed if two teams from the EFL got to the FA Cup final."
If Grimsby got to the FA Cup Final to play, at random, Doncaster, it would be the greatest fucking thing ever. Ever. This doesn't just apply to Town obviously. For whichever two underdog teams got there. But you'll have to go and visit their fanzine fantasies to read about them getting to Wembley. This one is about Town beating Lincoln (City or United: they're both still in it), Scunny, Leeds, Chelsea, Man C, Man U and Liverpool to reach Wembley.
Anyone who has ever seen or heard the name Grimsby Town would want a ticket for the game. NE Lincs would soar and hover three feet above sea level for the next 50 years. Donny fans would probably be excited too. Contrast that with Sunderland B and Wolves B and a shared minibus of their fans off to Wembley for the EFL Trophy Final.
It didn't go unnoticed that the delusional serial bankrupter of clubs hilariously referred to B teams as "non-EFL clubs". Why am I surprised about that eejit any more? Let's find real surprises to be surprised about. Ah, perfect, here's one: "Surprise for shoppers as Grimsby Town stars help out at the checkout" leads the Telegraph website today. Surprised? I'm stunned. There's Ashley Chambers brilliantly dodging several long check out lines before missing the bag with a head of cabbage. He only got out of hospital yesterday morning. Is he Superman or something?
No – this charity event in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support happened on Friday. The Telegraph could have put this on the article as it would have saved me from calling Paul Hurst and Dave Moore heartless and uncaring employers. Seriously, nice bit of work from Ash, Jamie Mack, Shaun, Ben Davies and others for attending. Gotta love seeing the team play its part in the community and it's not something to be taken for granted.
Another surprise to me was Hursty breaking rank a tad in an article mentioned by yesterday's diary. It seemed odd that he would take to the Telegraph to bemoan the lack of a conditioning coach. He wasn't washing the laundry in public, maybe just dusting the front door mat off the garden wall, but I don't recall him doing that before. From the outside, with the youth academy it appears we have made improvements off the field but he wants more, more, more. Jump for my love. Sorry, went all Pointer Sisters there.
Get a conditioning coach but do it within us means. Maybe it's a good thing if the board isn't stumping up. A question raised by Devon Diary but not answered at the recent fans forum asked why the club is intentionally being run at a small loss. Each year we are asked to thank the directors for putting their hands in their pockets to keep us ticking along. In reality the loss looks like it could be avoided by cutting some unnecessary dust-gathering items of expenditure – like non-alcoholic beer in the bars or youth team players in the first-team squad.
Remember when we grumbled about the club voting for the EFL Trophy, the plebs were reminded that the board had a "fiduciary duty" to look at and vote for the proposal. Look out when people wearing ties start using clever phrases like that instead of just financial duty or just plain duty. Politicians and football pundits are the number one offenders in this category. Policians I can almost forgive, but commentators will never be forgiven for the emergence of the word physicality. And players no longer just do: they "execute".
To get back to the point, is the board neglecting its fiduciary duty by running the club at this small annual loss? And Hursty himself has to look at how he has used his budget. We welcomed the reserve team thumping Mansfield last week. Is the balance right, though, when it is Craig Disley and not Josh Venney who is being squeezed out of the squad, as happened on Saturday? Anyway, we don't need a conditioning coach. Tell Hurst to get on Twitter, he'll quickly see that a popular hobby for most of his squad is posting selfies from the gym.
That's it for me, beyond a plug for Pat Bell's excellent Scott McGarvey interview if you haven't already read it. Who would you like us to collar next? The demographic at CA means that most of our suggestions fit in an era ranging from Joe Waters to Kevin Donovan. That's cool but personally I'd also love to read or hear suggestions and comment from Blundell Park: The Next Generation with Russell Slade as Jean-Luc Picard, the directors of Yeovil Town as The Borg and Thomas Pinault as Thomas Pinault. Or something. Anything in fact better than that sentence.