Cod Almighty | Diary

Ab absurdo ad astra

22 December 2016

It would make perfect sense if reports are correct and Town are trying to sign Jamey Osborne. He's currently with Smiley Marcus's previous club Solihull Moors. He's one of the most highly rated talents in non-League football. He's a creative midfielder, and the only thing Town's bloody awful midfield looks capable of creating right now is a stink. So it's a good fit. But if the 24-year-old follows his former manager to the east coast, where will that leave the other seven central midfielders currently on the books at Blundell Park? Who decides that a perfectly adequate and functional forename like Jamie suddenly needs to be spelt differently, and why do I never receive the memo?

One of those seven, of course, is another highly rated young talent, whose name is Josh Venney. There's a lot of talk about Town's youth system at the moment, and Rich Mills' incisive article on these pages yesterday seems to your original/regular Diary to be exactly the hammer that was needed to find the head of the nail. As if in direct reply, academy manager Neil Woods can be found in the Grimsby Telegraph today setting out his vision for the future:

"I would like to get to a situation where A, we're providing players who are good enough for the first-team, and B, if there are a couple of injuries, [Smiley Marcus's] first port of call is the academy, rather than feeling like he has to go out and bring in lads on loan.

"We know it's going to take a few years to get to that stage. I believe we got to that stage before at this football club, and I think we can get back to that again."

A few years? It's good to hear Woodses's optimism and positivity, of course – and that's kind of the only thing he can say – but a few years? It's almost as if we've given up on the current lot already. Maybe we've all given up on youth development in general, what with no intention on the part of England's governing body to address the toxic situation they have allowed to develop whereby the richest clubs hoover up all the best players at the other clubs' academies for the transfer fee of a conker and a shiny sixpence, coach all the flair and creativity out of them, send them on loan to Crawley and St Mirren, and then fail to offer them a new contract at the age of 23, bringing to a vastly premature end a career they themselves have never given the vaguest of chances to flourish. Still, you've got to keep smiling, eh.

That's about it from me until next week. Tomorrow Mrs Diary and I are off down south to spend Christmas with her family, whose local club St Albans City FC I used to go and watch now and again during similar visits to the in-laws, partly to get away from a house whose most prominent reading material is Hello! magazine and the Mail on Sunday, and partly for the sheer joy of watching football in a ground where one section of terracing had a tree growing out of the middle of it. I took to following Saints' results for a time, but once the tree was felled, my interest seemed to wane.

Happy Christmas, readers, and in the meantime please do use CA's feedback form or Twitter to tell us about smaller football clubs you may have 'adopted' at some point in your lives, and the more quirky things involved like trees in rows of terracing, the infinitely better.