Cod Almighty | Diary

The mushroom treatment

27 October 2016

Just a second, Middle-Aged Diary is on the phone. "What was that? You want to know when I'll have fixed the roof so you can move back in... I've already told you, I'm not going to give you a running commentary on repairing your house."

There is a trick - we have all done it, whether we are the Prime Minister or the major shareholder of a fourth flight football club - of responding to reasonable but unwelcoming questioning by distorting the question to make it sound unreasonable. Almost a week since the odds on Paul Hurst taking the job at Shrewsbury Town started tumbling, we still do not know why he wanted to move from a club in danger of getting promoted to the third flight to one in danger of getting relegated from the third flight.

We can, and will, speculate about relative salaries, the availability of a fitness coach, and the emphasis Hurst gave to saying he wanted to work with "honest, football people." We might never see the answers. At least not until the publication of Keeping us shape: the Paul Hurst story, available in good club shops from November 2032. It's a good read until page 170, when Hurst writes "We've done enough now. I'm not writing anything else. Danny Parslow will tell you the rest". Also the foreword by Rob Scott consists largely of asterisks.

We can and we will speculate, and make up the answers to suit our prejudices. What worries me is that people whose living is football will also be speculating. And they, unlike us, will get the answers, off the record, from friends and friends of friends inside the game. I've no doubt we are getting multiple applications to replace Hurst. But 'due diligence' cuts both ways. The potential managers with the strongest CVs will be the ones who can most afford to be choosy if they don't like what they hear.

Now at Cod Almighty Towers, as you have probably guessed, we have a motto. It is engraved on our portico and it appears on our screen savers in those rare moments when our laptops are idle for more than five minutes. For every dilemma, there is a simple question to set us on the path of enlightenment: "What would Buckley do?"

And yet. In the Telegraph, Alan Buckley is quoted as saying "It is not for me to tell [Grimsby Town] what to look for in a new manager." This must be The story of the cranes, with Buckley mistaking satanic suggestion for divine revelation. There is, literally, no one in the world better qualified to tell us who we should be looking for in a new manager. If the board is not begging for his opinion and involvement in the recruitment process, then 'due diligence' is just an empty phrase.

Buckley was being invited to speculate on the prospects of Nigel Adkins making himself available to Town. Adkins has told Matt Dean that he has not heard from the club, the implication also being that the club has not heard from him. That shortens the odds on Curtis Woodhouse being the new man in the manager's seat. However, talks appear to be foundering on Woodhouse's insistence on a clause in his contract that he will never be required to read out listeners' emails live on Radio Humberside.