Cod Almighty | Diary

Get your facts right

20 September 2019

Did you know? Rob Earnshaw is the only player to have scored a hat-trick in all four domestic leagues in England, and in both the FA Cup and League Cup. He’s also netted a treble for his national team, Wales.

If you like those sorts of facts then help yourself to 29 more. Although the article is a little out of date ("Sergio Batista and Gennaro Gattuso are apparently the only 2 players to have won the World Cup while sporting a full beard"), it’s still full of some of the wonderful oddities that exist in our beautiful sport. Random football fact #31 has yet to be written, but if it’s not to announce that Grimsby Town are the only club in English football to have had a goal disallowed by the fourth official, then something’s wrong with the world.

If you have an obscure fact about the Mariners – beyond the ones we all know, like our role in setting Old Trafford's biggest ever attendance – then please tweet us, email us and fact us in the face with your Town trivia.

Yesterday the club announced that all tickets for the Chelsea match had been sold. That means more than 5,000 Town fans will be heading to Stamford Bridge next Wednesday night, representing an incredible effort for a midweek game down in London. And sat next to your West Yorkshire Diary in the office is an appalling human being who’s boasting that his team, Everton, are going to sell out for their short hop across the Pennines to take on Wednesday at Hillsborough, like that’s an achievement.

I’m sure Michael Jolley and his players will all reject the suggestion that league results have dipped because everyone’s saving themselves for Chelsea. Any suggestion that the fans were saving themselves for Chelsea were dispelled when a thousand of us turned up at Salford on Tuesday night. It was a remarkable turnout for what was a generally unremarkable match – apart from that fourth official thing, which was pretty remarkable.

But up first is our bread and butter game against an old nemesis. If there’s another club out there who’s got a better record at Blundell Park than Macclesfield then I’d like to know who it is. We may have squeezed past them on penalties after a goalless draw to set up that League Cup tie against Chelsea, but previous to that the Silkmen had won on each of their last five visits.

Jon-Paul Pittman was the last Town player to score against Macclesfield at Blundell Park – which came in a 2-1 defeat, back in January 2015 – and you have to go all the way back to February 2010 for the last time we took any points off them in front of our own fans. The one and only time we’ve beaten the Silkmen on home turf (in 12 attempts) was the 3-1 win we recorded in 2005-06, when Gary Jones, Tom Newey and Gary Cohen were on the scoresheet.

Town will be without Ludvig Öhman for tomorrow's match, and if Harry Davis only has a slim chance of making the Chelsea game then I'd expect Luke Waterfall and Mattie Pollock to be paired at the back. The free-scoring Town of August have hit a dry spell, with just two goals in four September matches, so Jolley may choose to 'freshen' things up in attack – and maybe in formation? Who knows. Harry Clifton could come back into contention following his time away on international duty. That might keep Elliott Hewitt at right-back, which is where he's played his best games for us.

So then, who’s going to be the prick in the middle with the whistle for tomorrow’s game? The new and superb official site says it’s James Adcock – a man given a score of 7.001 in Mr Butcher’s report of our non-game at Oldham last March, which was generous given that he failed to award us a free kick when Ahkeem Rose quite literally had his shirt ripped off his back. Good luck, James Hanson. You’re going to need it.

And just so you know, the fourth official will be Anthony Da Costa – not the singer-songwriter from New York, and definitely not yer boy from the pop band Blue. He might want to get himself involved if he thinks the referee or linesman have missed something – you know, like a keeper coming two yards off his line to save a Hanson penalty, or something.