Cod Almighty | Diary

What if you only *have* 26 friends?

8 February 2018

Pro tip: if you’ve gone to all the trouble to set up the majority shareholder of a failing football club with a hidden recording of a private conversation, and he says he sacked a previous manager with a better record than the current one because the previous manager was a “fruitloop”, ask him why he gave a job to a fruitloop.

Hello and welcome to a brief Thursday recap with your original/regular Diary. Russell Slade’s dastardly masterplan to get rid of all the players he inherited and replace them with worse ones continues with the mid-contract release of Akwasi Asante. Asante, lest you forget, was recently sent to Solihull – which is geographically and idiomatically very much like being sent to Coventry, except Coventry is a sore point with Slade – on loan, we were told, to rebuild his match fitness after an injury. In this he follows the pattern of Chris Clements and Jamey Osborne, and it would have been the same with Sam Jones had he been injured. Well, Russell, I think the phrase is you lose trust.

Sorry, did I say get rid of all the players he inherited and replace them with worse ones? I meant build for the future by getting rid of the club’s own contracted players and replace them with loanees.

It ain’t all bad, mind, because Dave Roberts has returned to the board of the Mariners Trust. Members of the CA team crossed paths with Dave during his previous term with the trust and we were sad when he stepped down, because he impressed us almightily with his empathy, integrity, and nous. With the likes of Kris Green and Paul Savage unable to continue in their previous roles, let us nibble on a reasonably sized crumb of comfort in the reappearance of Dave.