Cod Almighty | Diary

Toby. Toby? Toby? Toby Wong. Toby Wong? Toby Wong. Toby Chung?

19 June 2023

Miss Guest Diary writes: Anyone who read the 'My Favourite Shirt' programme article which I featured in last year will know that back in the 1990s Mr B and I jinxed the careers of several promising Town youngsters by sponsoring their kits. At least that's how it seemed to us, because none of the players we sponsored really made it. Feeling his career was too well-established to be affected, we did dip our toe back in the water in 2005 to sponsor Gary Croft's shirt – which is the one described as "my favourite" in the article. We hadn't thought about doing it again until I saw a Tweet a couple of weeks ago looking for someone to sponsor new signing Toby Mullarkey's kit and I simply couldn't resist – for the silliest of reasons.

For many years we worked with a chap who was a cricket fanatic and a member of Middlesex Cricket Club, eventually becoming a committee member. About 12 years ago, when Nottinghamshire were playing at Lord's, he invited Mr B and I to spend a day in the committee room watching the game, and a fabulous experience it was. Free drinks, a three course lunch with wine and a scrumptious cream tea, plus a personal tour of the pavilion and a walk on the hallowed turf. When we arrived we were introduced to the club president and his wife, who misheard Tony's name as Toby, and he was known as that for the rest of the day. I have always since maintained, only half jokingly, that Tony is simply too common a name for the rarefied air of Lord's.

There: a very silly reason for sponsoring Mullarkey; let's just hope our capacity for jinxing a player has worn off.

On Thursday Abo Eisa arrived at BP, a player Paul Hurst has worked with before at both Shrewsbury and Scunthorpe. A bit like McAtee, then; let's hope he makes a similar impact. That makes four new signings so far, three of them forwards. How long before the glass-half-empty merchants are calling for Hurst's head because he hasn't signed enough defensive players?

It seems whoever runs the FA Cup Twitter account must be as strapped for news as we are here at CA Towers. They spent last week running polls for the FA Cup Team of the Season. Remarkably, the eventual team contained three Town players – Efete, Glennon and Holohan – and, it has to be admitted, also two Wrexham players. Far be it from me to burst anyone's bubble, but with less than 30,000 votes being cast across 11 different polls, the cynic in me says that the whole exercise was simply beneath the notice of fans from the bigger clubs. Yesterday the same account posted a graphic showing the top goalscoring teams from the first round proper onwards. Town came second only to the eventual winners, with 15 to their 19, and scored more than both Brighton and Man Utd. That's better, simple facts which can't be disputed.

The final countdown is on to the release of the fixture list on Thursday. All I will say is please, please let it be a home game on Boxing Day so we don't run the risk of being trapped in post-Christmas family jollity like last year.

UTM