Cod Almighty | Diary
Do you want a rigid or a flexible cystoscopy?
12 October 2020
Welcome, fellow little people, to the new world order. The future of football: the gods have spoken and ambrosia will flow from the heavens, just as long as we offer up a couple of sacrificial lambs.
Ah yes, we all have to believe in the benevolent and magnificent munificence of American billionaires.
Your Deviant Diary very much sees the weekend's Yankee doodle yabberings as football's version of charming psychopath Lorne Malvo offering up a Hobson's choice for punishment: "One phone for the hearse, one phone for the ambulance. You decide."
There will be blood. We just have to decide how many limbs we're prepared to lose to live.
For to live is to lose two clubs from the fourth tier of England's "football family". To the American owners of Lancashire heritage clubs "the likes of" Town are simply a feckless loser half-cousin second removed. Their predecessors probably met us once, they can't remember when or where, they may send a wreath to our funeral if their PA is scanning the obituaries.
It's nothing personal, it's just business.
As long as it's Crawley and Stevenage, that's OK. With them it is personal, not just business.
Project Big Picture: half good, half insidiously bad in the long term. The devil is in the detail – always read the small print. It's a bribe to the FA and a hand out to the Football League, all wrapped inside a power grab by the wealthiest shareholders in a limited company. That's all the Premier League is: a limited company owned by its shareholders, existing for one purpose - to further the financial interests of those shareholders. Oh, the games rich people play. Do we care, should we care which set of oligarchs control The Football Association Premier League Limited? Let us bow before Rockin' Ricky Parry, for his plaintive rendition of Buddy can you spare a dime? really tugged at the heart strings of the billionaires inside their McMansions on their McIslands. Golden crumbs!
The Football League are prepared to lose their littlest fingers. Tough for those two clubs eh, down here in the dregs. It's probably not a good time to have a bad year so it's a good job Holliver's army is on its way then.
Football, at last. At last we have football to ponder. At last. Covid-free, rule-following Town travelled to lockdown central with a bunch of players, some of whom the Pied Piper had met, and emerged with a point from nothing. We're on our way, we are Holloway's 35. This time, more than any other time, this time, he found a way to get it right. Or at least not wrong.
The West Country Class Warrior was proud and prickly in his post-match state of the nation lecture; delighted that his haphazard hotch-potch survived until quarter to five, but furiously fulminating about the state of football.
What does he want? The redistribution of wealth through the application of collective powers for the benefit of the masses. When does he want it? Now! Yes, Mr Ian Hollyway, the solution is simple. It's called socialism.
As the Holly One rambled and rolled out some old bamboozling nonsense about chicken nuggets with double barbecue sauce, the address to the nation ended plaintively, pleadingly, painfully: the money's going to run out… the money's going to run out.
And that, as they say in business, is the bottom line.
But today there's still a tomorrow and now our feeder club for Cleethorpes Town is on a roll, let's roll on Cheltenham. Just listen to the colour of your dreams.