Cod Almighty | Diary
A heavy load
27 June 2017
Wicklow Diary writes: The solstice has come and gone and it's all downhill from here. The players are back in town and pre-season is officially underway. A few weeks ago, Sort It Slades spoke of his intention to get his business done early in order to give his new squad maximum gel time. This hasn't quite played out and the gaps at three and nine are there for all to see in the squad numbers released yesterday.
Desperate for a signing to wake us up, Town fans have taken to the social medias and issued embarrassing pleas to loaner/keeper Dean O'Henderson. He has a big smile and leaps like a Matt Tees reared on a diet entirely of salmon but come on, lads and lasses. Have a bit of respect for yourself and our actual number one – at six years, the longest-serving player at the club by roughly six years. I know Harry Clifton's has been 'here' for two years but no manager dares give him a first-team spot. The lad doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page yet. Sort it Wikis.
Incidentally, if you look for him on Wikipedia, you'll the find the first Harry Clifton to play for Town. He died on 28 May 1998, two weeks before the current Harry was born. Maybe this year... [looks at our portacabin of midfielders at Cheapside, remembers Slade's record with youth last time round, decides not to hold breath] A portacabin of midfielders? That could certainly that work as a collective term for some midfields we've had. Cheap, temporary and mobile only if you have access to heavy lifting equipment and a flatbed truck.
Even worse, a single tabloid rumour has formed the basis of hope and mushroomed several other newspaper articles that Nottingham Forest's Tyler Sonofdes is auditioning for the role of Raw Pacy Manbag Carrier so adequately filled by Kayden Jackson in last season's production. Baseless tabloid nonsense or not, Forest to Town gives me a tenuous enough link to link to this.
Russ isn't the only one finding it difficult to get things done. One of the CA team tried to get his early bird business completed by buying his season ticket yesterday on the Super New Official Site. His feedback on the transaction has been rejected by Which?, Google and the United Nations but I felt it deserved to be shared.
Fucking hell – they make all that effort to redo the SNOS, but the commercial bit – the bit that actually draws ACTUAL FUCKING MONEY – they just leave as the same old shitty fucking website. Like it was built in fucking Geocities in I DON'T KNOW ABOUT 1970 OR SOMETHING! I had to click the word 'season ticket' about 8 bastard times before it would even let me start to buy the fucker. Then it feels like you have to fill in 10 bastard pages to get the thing even thought I WAS FUCKING LOGGED IN ANYWAY. And then it always feels like the most insecure site ever, like Fenty is on the other end writing everything down on a big sign that he's then going to parade around the town with. You know FUCK NEW STADIUMS. Just get the basics right first you absolute fuck knuckles. How the fucking fuckity fuck are we ever going to build a stadium if we can't even do a BASTARD WEBSITE
Thanks for tha-
Jesus FUCK!
Oh sorry, I thought you had-
And then the email from the club goes directly to my spam folder. Well, yes. Exactly. Fucking NORA!
Seriously, try it: You click season ticket, then buy online, then season ticket again, then season ticket again. Then you can actually select the season ticket you want. Then add it to your cart. Then add another. Then the cart disappears. But then it comes back. Then it says you can choose different delivery methods, but it doesn't actually give you the options it states. Then just the whole form is an absolute car crash. Then finally you can get to pay after about 2 million different screens.
If the club were even slightly high-profile someone would have tried to hack that website by now. I know nothing about hacking, but whenever I use it I always feel like if I spent a couple of hours messing with it I could probably download everyone's credit card details...
Anyway, I think I've bought a season ticket. Now I just need to do my usual thing of crossing my fingers and praying to the football gods that it actually turns up.
Wow, it doesn't matter how swanky the new site is, they're gonna need a bigger swear filter if we send that as feedback. I wouldn't worry about the stadium though – they'll get experts in to build that. Like they did with the website.
As a club, we're not running to stand still. We're not even standing still. We're sort of flopping about on the ground like a dying fish
Joking and incandescent profanity aside, it's a bit rubbish isn't it? As a club, we're not running to stand still. We're not even standing still. We're sort of flopping about on the ground like a dying fish.
Town made little noticeable effort to capitalise on last year's Wembley victory. One of the great moments in the club's recent history – the only one for a generation – and they did nowt. At a time when, with six years of catching up to do, we could ill afford to stand still.
Lincoln are surfing the wave of promotion rather than letting it lap gently on the sea wall. With similar efforts twelve months ago (and the sales systems to support it!), we could have almost filled BP with season tickets alone. That would provide challenges of its own but they'd be nice challenges to face. If we couldn't all fit in BP, it would also finally give us a shred of a business case for moving.
There are some great people working at GTFC: they just don't seem to excel as a team with a plan and leadership. Maybe the answer to why not lies in that new stadium that we're always building. Have the board and management taken their eyes off the day-to-day over the past few years in an honest effort to get the stadium project going? Distracted themselves and their staff with what must be a complicated and time-consuming process?
Should we even get hung up on the long term anyway? Let's just watch the football. Let's live in the now and clutch at the straw of positivity in a handful of needles. Forget that we have to learn another set of names, faces and numbers. Ignore that a face we know and love isn't even a dropped cross away from being called a useless twat by his own fans. Pretend that we're not stuck in a cycle of short-sighted mismanagement that makes our next divisional movement more likely to be downwards than upwards.
Pre-season should be a time for optimism, a chance to wipe the slate clean. On our side, it seems a good proportion of the clubs in the league are equally duff. It doesn't matter how bad all 24 of us are – one deadbeat will still have to finish top. Why not us? Bring it on.