Cod Almighty | Diary

DELIRA AND EXCIRA

21 March 2018

Goals! Actual goals! Four of the buggers! Granted, they were scored by a team of full professionals against Doncaster Rovers' under-12s or something, but. Goals! Your original/regular Diary already feels kind of sorry for Mallik Wilks, whose brace in yesterday's run-out for the stiffs will result in ridiculous levels of expectation being placed on his shoulders by Town supporters experiencing squeaky hindquarters as the relegation run-in approaches and push comes to shove in the club's desperate current predicament.

I also feel a bit sorry for the Grimsby Telegraph, because I'm about to make fun of it for using the phrase "blistering start" in response to the scoring at a Tuesday afternoon reserve game on a training ground somewhere near Armthorpe being opened in the 14th minute – assuming, of course, that this is what the Telewag's unnecessarily vague "inside the opening 14 minutes" means. You might think our insistence on the highest literary standards might be forgotten during the most desperate predicament yet of the club's 140-year history, but you'd be wrong.

To be fair to the media, while Town's desperate predicament has the fans so desperate that they'll gobble up even the most tenuous non-item of half-arsed fake news in the hope of finding some crumb of optimism between the lines, there's actually nothing new to say from one week to the next. With the transfer window being closed and no sign of Michael Jolley bringing in any more of those 'free agents' we were hearing so much about last week, reporters have very little to report between matches other than "injured player no longer injured" and "person X offers positive assertion Y in defiance of desperate predicament".

Person X today is Jolley himself, valiantly continuing to talk a good game, with no sign of dejection despite his recent experience at Lincoln, watching the players he inherited go down like a Poundland paddling pool. Given the way I perform at work (or anywhere else) when I'm tired, I'm not sure I'd like MJ to follow through on his promise to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep Town up, but to be fair he does seem to have more energy than me. My favourite part is the manager's assertion that "I see the task in the same way as I saw it when I joined the club two weeks ago", which I think tells us everything we need to know about the desperate current predicament of our journalists.