Cod Almighty | Diary
Lay a little egg for me
7 September 2018
Tribute to Mardy Diary Diary writes: The do-gooder department at the tax-dodging multinational where I work is on the prowl. Their eyes are sparkling with mindless enthusiasm, looking for volunteers for a bag-pack to raise 30k for the local foodbank. That's a bag-pack on your day off to collect for a charity that wouldn't be needed if big companies, you know, paid their fucking taxes. Let's get this diary over with quickly so I can go and get my gun.
Peaks Parkway stadium. Get lost. Even the dogs on the street know it's dead. No-one wanted to go there except a few gobshite Tories. For my next tautology, read yesterday's masterpiece from West Yorkshire Diary. Case closed. Shut up. Zip it. Build it. Anyone pulling against that idea doesn't have the best interests of the club and the town at heart. Nigel Lowther knows. So does Peter Wheatley. Both were on Radio Humberside this morning. Nigel gave a passionate rallying call to all stakeholders to get together and make it happen. "If this was in Hull, it would be built by now." Now that is throwing down the gauntlet.
Wheatley is the council's portfolio holder for regeneration, housing, skills and assets. He revealed that the council have been trying to steer the club away from Peaks Parkway and reconsider the East Marsh site for the stadium. Booo council, trying to help the football club and doing civil-minded, sensible things in the interest of the town.
John Fenty? He'll no doubt tell us it can't be done, just like he did in 2015. That's if he's still talking to Burnsy. Remember that amid the insanity of the last fans' forum, he condescended to a room of people with the fishing industry in their blood that "as someone from the fishing industry", fish and chips at the new stadium were something he just couldn't see being possible.
Wait. Fried food. At a football stadium. John can't see it. That's small-town, small-minded crap at its best or worst. Is that the spirit that bridged the Humber, built the Dock Tower or saw GY become the greatest fishing port the world has ever known or will know? "Sorry mate, can't get chips here, we can heat you up a three-week-old burger though"?
With a can't-do attitude like that, there's no limit to the routine stuff we can't do. Certainly it's no surprise that sod remains unturned at Peaks Parkway. There has to be more to it. It's more a case of 'if John doesn't want it, it means it can't be done'. In making his rallying cry Nigel Lowther pointed out that "personalities have got in the way of progress in Grimsby for too long". If Fenty can't climb aboard and row with the rest of us, he should get gone and stay gone.
This 'Fenty out' message was broadly the one revealed by the Mariners Trust survey. Yes, the survey, remember that? What the hell are we playing at there then? It's been months. The trust has said it's working on something with Supporters Direct. Who knows the whats and whens of that – but is the trust as dead as Peaks Parkway? Many may have missed this little nugget from ex-chair Paul Savage on the Fishy at the height of the summer heatwave:
"More than happy to share the emails from the Trust board member to the club board saying he didn't agree with the fans survey or the direction of the Trust so he could save his seat on the board if you'd prefer? I'm not interested in 'vague injustices' – the fans suffer when they're not represented as they should be. And they're not being under the current setup of the Trust. Just my opinion having witnessed it first hand.”
Wow, just wow. Has the trust director has forgotten why he's there?
Maybe the trust is just taking a lead from those pillars of football admininstration over at the Football League. What a bunch. Fans can't possibly know what they want, so let's give them what we want. The game at Bury tomorrow will be streamed on IFollow. Wait! we all cried. 3pm on a Saturday is sacred. No live broadcast. Never to be tampered with. Hang about – why are we surprised? Binning the Saturday 3pm rule is a bagatelle compared to crap like B teams.
Take a look at Andy Holt's Twitter to see that it wasn't just fans who were surprised by the change. Club chairmen across the land are spitting out their tea this morning. Yet Shaun Harvey always tells us he's just acting out the wishes of the clubs.
Right now, it looks as those wishes are to have as many empty stadiums as possible. This week, Football League Cup and Trophy matches were played out in front of sparsely populated stadiums. It's an epidemic. Weakened FA Cup teams, weakened League Cup teams, weakened third and fourth division teams playing B teams.
It's clear that the clubs and fans don't want all this football, so why do they keep scheduling it? The league has remained immune to this watering down, being the thing everyone wants to stay strong for by being weakened for everything else. 3pm streaming should take some of the gloss off that. Truth be told, the genie popped out of the bottle when the 3pm kick-offs were made available to overseas subscribers. Anybody in the UK bothered to Google "VPN, IFollow" could have been watching these games.
Right. Housekeeping. Max Wright and Ahkeem Rose have shipped up to Boston on loan. Don't panic, it's just a month loan, not a Sladian, don't forget to pack your winter clothes, season-long jobbie. And the B team trophy has got more terms and conditions than my mobile phone contract. One of them is that players out on loan can still play for their parent club. So both will be available for those games we are boycotting. More super youth news – and loanee Elliot Embleton scored for England yoof yesterday in a 2-0 success over Switzerland.
That's it. Your homework for today is to listen to the stadium stuff on Burnsy. It was at about 10:40am. UTM.