Cod Almighty | Diary

Nothing to see here, move along please

16 February 2021

March 16 is, in Lithuania, the day of the book smugglers. If you are thinking of bibles, or political treatises, you are wide of the mark. The works being smuggled were written using the Latin alphabet, to counter the Tsarist government's 19th century attempts to Russify the Baltic state by imposing the Cyrillic script. If you are thinking this has very little to do with a Grimsby Town fanzine, you have a point.

March 16 is also the saint's day of Hilarius of Aquileia. His prayers led to the collapse of pagan temples, leaving a wreckage of fallen masonry, the images of false gods (one oddly wearing a cloth cap and known to have spoken in a West Country accent), and a broken snooker table.

March 16 2021 is, finally, the date when Grimsby Town will play their postponed match against Tranmere Rovers, the battle of the estuary south bankers, ish. The game will therefore be slap-bang in the middle of a period when we are playing Tuesday-Saturday-Tuesday, making diaries like this one a distant memory.

Gloucester City, Domestic Diary has just learnt, are nicknamed the Tigers. I feel for their manager, Paul Groves: he must have that faint feeling of having to touch a stranger's worn underwear every time he cannot avoid using the epithet. He says "The Tigers" but listen carefully and you hear a pause while in his head he goes "The - not Hull City - Tigers."

In his interview, repackaged for the Grimsby Telegraph, Groves says only what you would expect the manager of a team hoping for promotion from the Conference North to say. It is still a useful corrective for anyone imagining that the suspension of non-League football would give Grimsby a victimless get out of jail free card.

But enough. I'm here really only to point you to Neville Butt's wonderful memories of a player who ranks alongside Groves in the esteem of Grimbarians: Ron Rafferty.

Bye.