Cod Almighty | Diary

All roles moving forward will be firmly sat under the GTFC umbrella

14 December 2017

At Cod Almighty, while we may often critique the way in which our football club is run, and at times with some vigour, we always try to be fair. There are certain principles involved. One is that we don’t complain for the sake of complaining: there must be what we see as a good reason. It sounds obvious, but there are plenty of people out there who seem to just moan because they enjoy it, whether justified or not, and this scattergun approach means that when their criticisms are justified, they may not be credible.

Another principle is that criticism should focus on actions and statements rather than on personalities. The latter will always influence the former, so it’s not always clear cut, and while we might be sardonic and satirical, we do our best not to be gratuitously mean-spirited.

A third principle is that we try and remember to give credit where it’s due. Based on the majority of John Fenty’s actions and statements while in charge of GTFC, your original/regular Diary would like our majority shareholder to write off the money he has benignly lent to the club and hand it over into supporter ownership. But I give him credit for the things he gets right, such as sticking with Paul Hurst as manager when some supporters argued for him to be replaced.

So let’s take a minute to think about the good things around our club. I don’t know what degree of involvement John Fenty may have had in, for example, the brilliant diversity mural which I think was commissioned by the Grimsby Town Sports and Education Trust and painted at the bottom of the Pontoon stand a few months ago. And there are other occasions on which the club’s commitment to diversity has rightly been questioned. But the mural is a good thing which has taken place on his watch. So it’s not all bad, is it, eh?

And let’s credit the club for its ongoing work with the Sporting Memories organisation, which works to support families affected by Alzheimer’s disease. This partnership has been in place for a while now and continues next month as the club hosts an evening of drama, music and readings linked to the theme, in the run-up to the Luton game on 27 January, which is designated a “memories game”. This is all excellent work.

Meanwhile, Town have handled the appointment of a second supporters’ liaison officer so badly that the existing one has resigned. Kristine Green’s tireless work as SLO to represent and further the interests of GTFC fans has been a light in the darkness. Not to have consulted or even informed her or the Mariners Trust about the appointment of Adie Merrikin is, sadly, symptomatic of the outright contempt in which the club so often appears to hold supporters and the trust.

The worst thing is that, while it’s shocking, it’s long since ceased to be surprising. Never forget that our club called a fans’ forum, and then a club director told a fan speaking at the forum to “shut up”. Never forget that our majority shareholder appears to believe that the job of journalists is not to ask questions and find things out but to passively disseminate his own messages. It’s pretty clear that under the current regime the club perceives communication not as dialogue but as monologue.

Hence, I suppose, someone calling himself a “club journalist” for GTFC is unable or unwilling to answer a simple and polite question about his role. But to finish off for today, let’s carry on giving credit where it’s due – this time to other people doing some actual journalism.

Liam Wood at the Grimsby Telegraph has made a feature of Kris’s resignation. It’s a collection of quotes rather than analysis, but this is precisely the sort of event that supporters might not always have expected to get much coverage in any proper media. Meanwhile, Trevor Green’s piece exploring Town fans’ reputation as pyro-wielding nutters may not probe the failure of Fenty and Nick Dale to evidence their assertions about underwear full of fireworks, but it is a thoughtful work of analysis; and it does call out the club’s orchestrated strikes against the host Matt Dean at the end of the fans’ forum for the “astonishing verbal attacks” that they were. Nice one.

Be angry. But avoid despair. Excellent things are being done, and jobs are being performed well, by people who are not far away. In trying to be fair perhaps I've ended up clutching at straws, but it makes me feel slightly less like beating my head against the wall. I hope Kris, Liam, Trevor, Matt and the GTSET and Sporting Memories people know that their efforts are appreciated.