Cod Almighty | Diary

Knygnešio diena

16 March 2021

We will play Tranmere Rovers with no great expectations tomorrow. That is how Paul Hurst likes it: "We're clear underdogs, and sometimes that brings out the best in us." "Let's hope it does" he adds, like a man who has spotted the flaw in his argument: there haven't been too many games lately where the Mariners have not been the underdog, and still we are six points adrift of safety.

It is a catch-22: if we started winning the games where we were underdogs, we'd soon be top dogs, and then we'd start losing again. Timing is everything, and perhaps we are planning to make our move when we go on the road to Mansfield and then to Barrow.

We also have Hurst's tepid take on the Shutes, Stockwood and Pettit club takeover. Safe to say that James Findlater did not holler "scoop" across the Grimsby Telegraph newsroom when he learnt that Hurst doesn't know why the deal hasn't gone through yet, but he doesn't think there is anything to worry about, and it won't make any difference at this stage of the season anyway.

The final stage of the takeover is approval by the Football League. At their Preston offices, they have an oak-panelled room where a hereditary peer sits with a telephone. Periodically, he is called on it, and asked to set the seal on a change of club ownership: "Let it be so" he says, in the grandest of voices and a scribe captures the moment on a sheepskin scroll. The real work of applying the fit and proper persons act and completing the paperwork has been done by someone else, for the earl, in reality, is a bit of a twit. His name is on the letterhead, but he has no duties except to wait for the telephone, which sounds only rarely; he is known, with deliberate irony, as "the lord of the rings".

One bright day, our beloved club will be rid of John Fenty and his confederacy of dunces, but not yet, so we shall have to hope that until then things fall apart no further. When the brave new world emerges, it may be we shall have to take the famished road, far from the madding crowd, where they play non-League football. No doubt we shall visit Wealdstone and Weymouth with both pride and prejudice. It shan't daunt us: we have known war and peace and one day, again, we shall climb the citadel. League One, they call it nowadays.

I've been Domestic Diary. Yes I am ashamed of myself.