Cod Almighty | Diary

Out of the know, and proudly so

30 March 2021

If you take one thing from today's Middle-Aged Diary - and frankly, you'll be doing well to take even that - it is this: never, ever, read an article in Football League World, no matter how intriguing its title; but if you do, do not blame its writer.

You remember how around a decade ago, no discount warehouse forecourt was complete without a six-metre, inflatable thin man, frantically bowing and waving its long blow-up arms to beseech you to stop and step inside. Imagine that today some advertising executive came up with a new gimmick, one somehow activated by a person kicking balls into a net connected to an animated display. Imagine the thoughts of the person whose job it was to keep it running. They had dreamt of playing for their home-town team, for their country, scoring incredible and memorable goals; instead they are monotonously kicking a succession of balls into an anonymous net.

In another field of dreams, meet Phil Spencer, an "aspiring author". His day job is providing the scantiest dressing to what is no more than a search through a soccer database, to produce the pretentiously titled "top 10 oldest players to ever feature for Grimsby Town". Not even time to read the Wikipedia entries to show that Sam Russell is on our coaching staff and that Paul Groves (as you know but the database does not: a fine midfield player who later converted into an OK defender) was sacked as player-manager days after playing his last game for us. And the database he used obviously doesn't run back far enough to include (the qualification "arguably" is hardly needed) our greatest-ever players Jack Bestall and George Tweedy.

Just don't go there: I wasted half an hour and a lot of emotional energy on it, so you don't have to. But as I say, don't blame Phil - he'll know only too well the value of what he is required to do. Blame the system.

Write your own jokes now, as "Hope departs the Mariners". Joey Hope was a well-regarded left back with the youth team: I saw him make a fine Gallimore-eque gallop down the wing the one time I saw the under-18s in action. No doubt the fact that with two left backs absent Paul Hurst still prefers to play Harry Clifton out of position indicates that he has not quite developed as quickly as we wanted, since Hope was given a one-year contract last summer. And no doubt Neil Woods has told him that there may still be ways back into the professional game even as that contract is terminated.

It must have been a devil of a time to be a first-year pro in a bloated squad that it sometimes feels was put together in the same spirit as the Producers' "Springtime for Hitler". Blame Fenty, blame Holloway, but don't give up Hope.