Cod Almighty | Diary

My money is on a Montel Gibson hat-trick

8 December 2020

It's the same old wine, and it isn't ageing well.

One of the many depressing things about 2020 has been the proliferation of the fig leaf statement. The obvious example is Dominic Cummings' explanation of his trip to Barnard Castle. There cannot be a sentient human being who heard it and found it genuinely convincing, but it provided just enough cover for government ministers to go on air and declare the matter closed; enough for those who wanted to believe it to pretend that they had been convinced. Meanwhile, the sense of solidarity from the first days of the lockdown was corroded, fatally.

Yesterday, club chair Philip Day offered us a fig leaf.

Too often it sets up coconuts, easy to knock down, but not really relevant. Middle-Aged Diary has no brief for Tom Shutes, but my understanding is that the offer to him is not to take the club over, but to accept a seat on the board, in return for substantial investment. Whether John Fenty is taking £50,000 a year out of the club I don't know, but it is a matter of public record that Grimsby Town's debts to directors have fallen from £2 million in 2017-18 to £1.5 million this year.

To the extent it addresses issues of real concern, it strains credulity. Apparently, we are now near the salary cap for division four clubs. The salary cap does not fully apply to players who agreed contracts before it came into force, so the actual wages being paid to players like Matt Green, James Hanson and James McKeown are not a consideration. It wasn't so long ago that Day himself told BBC Humberside that we were nowhere near reaching the cap, so was he wrong then, wrong now, or have we blown our budget on paying off Bilel Mohsni and Ludvig Öhman?

We really hope Montel Gibson and Alhagi Touray Sisay (to name but two) go on to prove themselves top-class Town players. Gibson has already proved himself a person not scared to step up to the plate and I confess my prejudice in favour of anyone signed from Aberystwyth Town. But either they have astonishingly good agents, or the person negotiating their contracts on Town's behalf did an incredibly bad job; that is the area where John Fenty himself still takes a hand, of course. It is very hard to see how we have spent so much on players stepping up from non-League or the academy.

Those who want to believe that all is well with Grimsby Town, that John Fenty is nothing less than the saviour of our club, will read Day's statement with just enough attention to allow themselves to be satisfied. For the rest of us - those who allowed ourselves to hope that because Day comes across as a warm and honest fan that the club had changed, or gave (not lent) the club our cash despite having Operation Promotion thrown in our face - something has been lost. Day's statement may rescue the club from a short-term, news management issue, but it deepens our long-term problems.

Pádraig Amond is one of the reasons why it is so easy to believe one of our players might have been told to get himself a second job if he was finding it hard to manage on the wages we pay him. Tonight he returns to Blundell Park with league-leaders Newport County, the match kicking off at 7pm.

Let's give the board some credit: two weeks ago they had got in a tangle over Ian Holloway's unfortunate post-match interview at Tranmere, but the players responded with a fine 2-1 win at Crawley. Perhaps Day is trying to engineer the same sense of crisis to engineer the same kind of performance.

Up the Mariners.