Cod Almighty | Diary

Welcome to the circus

29 September 2020

With no prospect of any game, let alone one we can attend, on the horizon there is little for those of us that get their enjoyment from football to look forward to. Leaving aside the politics, there seems little common sense to any decision-making process, at any level.

A relative of Casual Diary tweeted a picture of himself and his young family attending an entertainment venue on Saturday. It was well attended, socially distanced and in an enclosed space. He drew the comparison with being denied the opportunity to attend a half-full Blundell Park. Appropriately enough, he was at a circus.

The minister responsible stated over the weekend that the issue with football was not attendance at the ground but how people got to and from the ground.
He doesn't seem to realise that most people also start and finish work and school at the same time. Anyone witnessing the scenes in town and city centres at 10pm on Saturday cannot fail to be perplexed by the current situation.

Town have entered into the spirit of the times with the decision to cancel three games. The club statement says this was on advice from the Football League and medical officials as the incubation period of the virus is five days. The players had last trained with the unfortunate, infected player three days before. Which would suggest the reasonable way to proceed would have been to test the players yesterday or today and, if results allowed, continue with the next two games.

Club chair Philip Day has called for the season to be suspended. At best, that seems over the top. It also seems at odds with his previous statement about being able to fund the club until next season. The club has been helped by the £100,000 raised by supporters. A Premier League bail-out of £250 million is also imminent; apparently this is the amount requested by the Football League and they were just waiting on details. Just how this will be shared is not certain but an equitable distribution would give Town £3.4 million. That makes it hard to see where Day is coming from, especially just after trousering the cash from 1,300 season ticket holders.

Grimsby's training facilities have been closed for 14 days. It is hard to see why given that factories and schools continue to operate having had a deep clean. It is surely not beyond the staff to change at home or in their cars for a few days. With no new infections there are plenty of alternative facilities in the Town. The decision to postpone was clearly not welcomed by Bradford City, our scheduled opponents on Saturday.

The postponement of the nonsense trophy game against Hull is another puzzler. With the infected player last at the club a fortnight before the fixture was due to take place, any incubation period would have expired a full nine days previously. Assuming no new infections it would be perfectly OK for the game to go ahead. Given that when we have played the team has lacked cohesion and match fitness it would have been an ideal opportunity to get game time without the pressure of needing a result.

That it has been passed up, and we now plan to go into the Bolton game having had three days training has to be the most perplexing decision in a week when the bar has been set high. UTM