Cod Almighty | Diary

I superabound, but I still got nothin' to do

12 May 2023

Strange decisions are made all the time. The people at Pot Noodle, for example, decided to have the 'fill line' marked on the outside of the pot rather than the inside. The builders of a new housing estate at ground level on the A16 near Toll Bar, in a virtually treeless area, have decided to call their new estate 'High Forest'. Some people look at that horrible grey shale that resembles an industrial waste product and think 'that's just the stuff to cover my garden with. It'll look lovely.'

Plucky little Grimsby town manager Paul Hurst, however, is a man who makes sensible decisions. His retained list was met with general approval from the masses, the only decision that inspired debate seeming to be the decision to let Josh Emmanuel go.

I'm always wary of judging workplaces from the outside looking in. For example, there are two ways Hurst's interview with Emmanuel could have gone.

"Take a seat Josh. Now, how do you feel about being here next season?"

"I want it more than anything, boss. I'm determined to get my fitness back to 100%, play a huge part in this football team's progress and become a Grimsby Town hero in the process. I have fallen in love with the club and will happily play out my career here."

or

"Take a seat, Josh, Now how do you feel about being here next season?"

"To be honest, I've fallen out of love with football and my knees are knackered. I feel like I'm running on two Zoom lolly sticks. I want to open an owl sanctuary for sick and injured owls. I mean, if you want to offer me a contract I'll turn up and run about a bit, but my heart is with the owls. and their potential rehabilitation."

Which is a long-winded way of saying that decisions aren't always made on footballing grounds. It's one thing for us fans to sit there and say we should have kept Player A and let Player B go, but we don't know what is happening behind the scenes. I would have kept Josh on a footballing basis, but I know nothing.

Town fans aren't used to having such a long time without a match and the next two months are going to seem an eternity. We modern folks have become spoilt by media which is always available. Lovejoy fan? There's always an episode on somewhere. You can binge watch six seasons of some hip American tragicomedy on Netflix, or check out the sweatiest music videos ever made on You Tube. You can even watch clips from seventies racist comedy Love They Neighbour on Tik Tok. We live in an age of entertainment plenty. Yet the Grimsby Town show is over for the summer. To fill the void, many start speculating on transfer targets, the footballing equivalent of back fence tattle-tattle. Most of it - perhaps all of it - is nonsense, but it gives the speculators a feeling of involvement and excitement for the coming season.

As I've mentioned many times, in our division transfers usually involve people we've never heard of playing for teams at or around the same level. It was even worse in non-league, where news that we'd signed central midfielder Billy Normalboots from Gateshead could only be greeted with a shrug of the shoulders and a hope that he would be okay. On the surface George Lloyd from Cheltenham seemed less exciting than that bloke we got from Norwich, yet he was far more successful. It's a funny old game.

The good news is that Cod Almighty are still planning to bring you a daily diary right the way through the summer, so there will always be fresh and invigorating Grimsby Town debate delivered free to your door, and we have NO PLANS to hide it behind a paywall. Good, eh? I'd avoid the Friday ones though, they will mainly be about cricket and pop music trivia. Except one Friday my mate Deano will be writing a diary, and this is a man who has played football with Motorhead in the Winter Gardens car park so anything he writes will be worth reading. See? Stick with CA. Don't touch that dial. We can get through this together.