Cod Almighty | Diary

Talks about nothing

27 February 2018

Like many other Grimsby Town fans, your original/regular Diary feels a bit detached from my football club right now. I've not been to many games lately. I've switched off from the results – in both a televisual and a psychological sense. I hear hurricanes a-blowing. I know the end is coming soon. And I'm hiding under the covers with the pillow over my head.

It has reached my attention, however, that the Mariners are currently without a first-team manager. As a supporter I am generally expected to have an opinion on this state of affairs; specifically, on the issue of who ought to be appointed to fill the role.

The trouble is that I don't really care two hoots. One solitary hoot is quite a stretch, if I'm honest. For as long as the regime controlling the club remains in place, the identity of the team manager at any given moment doesn't really matter a toss in the end. Until they can be removed, the overall direction of travel will only be downward.

(Just to be clear, everyone's onside with that now, right? There are no remaining dissenters from that position outside of the Fenty bloodline? OK, good. Some of you took your time a bit, but at least we've all arrived eventually.)

Sometimes the downward trajectory will be temporarily interrupted. Amid their track record of overwhelmingly terrible decision-making, our current board appointed a good manager in Paul Hurst almost by accident, as part of a package with a poor manager in Rob Scott and only after being rejected by other candidates. They couldn't keep hold of him in the end, of course (having refused to fund an expansion in backroom staff which they were peculiarly quick to sanction for his successors), and our decline resumed shortly after an exasperated Hurst realised his ambitions would be better supported by the mighty Shrewsbury Town.

More often, though, the gravitational pull of incompetence will be more direct. It may not be John Fenty who conceded that penalty and then missed the one given to us, but it was John Fenty who reappointed Russell Slade, and it was Russell Slade who replaced Shaun Pearson and Adi Yussuf with Nathan Clarke and Jonathan Hooper.

Either way, it seems to me to be actually counterproductive to give our attention to the relatively trifling matter of who should be in charge of the team. While we're preoccupied with whether a current manager should or shouldn't be sacked, and who should replace them when they go, we're distracted from the overriding issue that the board is unfit to run the club.

So will today's diary avoid any discussion of who the new manager should or shouldn't be? Will it bollocks. There's knack all else to talk about.

There are fans who would be in favour of Sol Campbell, true – just as there were fans in favour of Nicky Law. I don't know any of them personally, so I'm going to make the outrageous and potentially offensive but fairly safe assumption that their judgement has been clouded by their Sky Sports subscriptions. Sol Campbell, you see, is quite well known.

This means some folk will be so dazzled by his celebrity status – swooning at the sheer glamour of the appointment, like a Hollywood groupie gasping for breath beside the red carpet – that they'll forget to consider whether he'd actually be, you know, the right person for the job. And knowing all that we know about him, we can safely conclude that Sol Campbell and Grimsby Town would be as constructive a match as a meringue and a quad bike.

Campbell may be relatively articulate, but scratch the surface and his utterances are revealed as hollow – informed by no genuine insight or substance; simply burnished by the power of his self-regard. There's nothing anywhere to suggest that Campbell at Grimsby would be any more successful a celebrity appointment than Adams at Wycombe, Hamann at Stockport, or Merson at Walsall.

John Fenty's recent claim that a lack of promising young coaches had applied for the job and his bizarre subsequent outreach to Campbell via the media are disappointing. They suggest that that the club's non-chairman could differ little from some of the fans in being as starry-eyed about celebrity status and sightless to the potential merits of 'lesser' names such as Paul Harsley.

I could be wrong. This time they might surprise us and get it right. But for the most part I'm set on a minimum requirement that the new manager can keep us in the Football League for a couple of years, until the club can be rescued from its current ruinous custodianship. Under the current regime any greater aspiration than that would seem fanciful.