Cod Almighty | Diary

Hemel Heskey, Stevenage Gerrard

2 November 2016

So where are we up to with this new manager gubbins, then? Have you been reading the papers? Personally I'd like to see fewer articles reporting movements in the betting market informed entirely by guesswork, and more articles examining exactly what might have changed at Blundell Park in between Paul Hurst's firm initial rejection of Shrewsbury's overtures and then his sudden compelling interest in a dead-end relegation scrap at a club no bigger than GTFC.

Make no mistake: something significant must have happened there. And far be it from your original/regular Diary to jump to conclusions, but given the track record of Town's non-chairman, I am a bit worried that he may have been let off the hook again here.

Hurst and Rob Scott, don't forget, were appointed almost by accident, as something like fifth or sixth choice, after a sequence of preferred targets knocked us back. In 2011 it said much about the way our club was being run that Steve Burr and Mark Cooper deemed Grimsby a worse career move than staying on with financial basket cases like Kettering Town and Kidderminster Harriers. With the same man at the helm today, I can't be the only one who's concerned that we've lost a good manager completely unnecessarily – and alarmed about what might happen next.

To my mind, some of the reported contenders are not at all encouraging. Some Town fans are excited about one of the bookies' favourites, Dave Jones, presumably because he was in the Premier League for a bit during a previous life. Unwanted managers often find work by dropping down the leagues in this way, appointed for their prestige and 'experience', and are almost never successful. File under 'totally out of touch, sacked within a year after 8 wins from 33 games'.

Some candidates developed a reputation while managing Town's little brother club Plucky Scunny during their implausibly successful recent years. Russ Wilcox's initial success at Glanford Park will – as his later spell at York City suggests – not prove replicable in other circumstances (think Groves keeping Town up in 2002). Nigel Adkins is a superficially impressive name, and will do well again at the right club, but his technocratic approach would surely founder at GTFC, where backroom staff are struggling to locate the floppy discs they recently ordered to upgrade the computer to Windows 98.

And then there's Brian Laws. Not a genuine candidate, obviously, but a sidebar in the debate by supporters. Make sure you're sitting down and remove any sharp objects from within easy reach. Ready? So thoroughly have members of the Fishy messageboard apparently lost their shit that one recent thread attempted a revisionist history of Brian Laws, whereby the Bonetti Incident is the one unfortunate mishap that tarnished a superb career as Grimsby manager which could otherwise have gone on to unparalleled glories. And there we were thinking he just took one season to destroy all the good work Alan Buckley had done over six or seven.

Some Town fans responded very favourably last week to the emergence of Curtis Woodhouse as a candidate. This seems to be based partly on his strong record as manager of Bridlington Town, and partly on his brief but impressive spell among Russell Slade's contenders in 2006. Mostly, however, it's because he once responded to Twitter abuse by driving a hundred miles to the home of the troll and threatening to pop him one. The rationale here seems to be that Woodhouse the football manager – who of course won light welterweight championships after his time at Blundell Park – might take a similarly tough line on any indiscipline among his players. Unfortunately this isn't 1974 and Rob Scott wasn't just a peculiar dream.

Let's finish on a positive, because for two reasons I feel unambiguously positive about the prospect of Marcus Bignot stepping in. One is simply that Bignot seems bright, articulate, hard-working and every bit the rising star type that in recent history has served the Mariners very well indeed. The other is the reassurance we need that Town might be doing things better now than in the past. In case you missed it, Bignot is reported to be interviewing today after John Fenty asked Solihull Moors for permission to speak to him about the managerial vacancy at Blundell Park. This represents a significant step towards professionalism compared with last time, when Fenty was ordered by a court to pay compensation to Boston United for tapping up Hurst and Scott behind their club's back.