Cod Almighty | Diary

It is what it is, but I'm not even sure what 'it' is, tbh

20 July 2023

I won’t pretend I know what’s going on at Grimsby Town Football Club these days. It’s very possible you know more than me, so for that reason today’s diary is going to be padded out, like a student blagging his way through a written exam.

Your West Yorkshire Diary has been reflecting on how the consumption of GTFC news has changed over the years. Remember the beepidy-boppidy-dingy-dongy-fuzz-fuzz days of dial-up internet, when ‘email’ was hyphenated and the world wide web was crawling with sites that had words splattered arbitrarily all over the place, flashing and scrolling away, with the embryonic willy-waving visitor counter at the bottom? When Tim Harvey grooved about the corridors of Blundell Park, doing skits for GTTV? Those were the days! The days of second division football.

I remember when the club first moved into this webbed world. One of the earliest iterations of an official site popped up on the back of a regular e-newsletter that basically generated what we’d now call a social network. Did you subscribe to it? If so, let us know your memories of it.

Anyway, once upon a time, I used to have an order to my consumption of news: check the official site first — because, you know, the club is going to know stuff before anyone else — then swing by the Grimsby Telegraph’s site for any editorial slant on the titbits sprinkled by the official site, and then onto Cod Almighty for a bit of a giggle. Maybe you’d call in at the Electronic Fishcake to read the Telegraph’s articles again, this time with the words in a different order, and maybe join a protracted debate on the message board about everyone’s top five house plants, which would easily get out of hand and inevitably end up with someone mentioning Hitler.

Today, if you want to know what’s happening at Blundell Park, or Cheapside, the very last place I’d visit is the official site. The Grimsby Telegraph website is totally unusable and Cod Almighty has people like me writing for it now; someone so short of ideas that he’s resorted to the classic ‘Ah, remember when’ get-out tactic. The Fishy has rebranded, but essentially it's still doing what it’s always done, so, in that sense, it’s been pretty consistent and a reliable source for debate and rumour.

If you really want to know what’s going on at Grimsby Town these days, the club’s Twitter account should probably be your first port of call. Either that, or Matt Dean’s account. And Twitter’s going down the shitter now, so it’s all going to change again soon.

While all these channels and modes of communication have been, in the most part, fun, I must admit that I’m tired of the relentlessness of it all. There’s now a load of pressure on clubs to apply wizardry and teasing into revealing each and every new signing. While extra bits and pieces like Matchday Moments have been most greatly received and hugely popular, I just feel exhausted by the rolling 24-hour news-a-thon that football clubs have had to become due to the juggernaut of unchecked thirst for information from people who just can't handle having any gaps in their lives.

Or, maybe, I just need to start going to bed earlier in the evenings.

It’s nice that the club is able to afford a week away in the south of Spain for pre-season training. It’s unfortunate their visit has coincided with one of the region’s most severe heatwaves in recent times. If Dave Moore wears shorts on a sleety Tuesday night in Cleethorpes, then one can only imagine his attire in Spain right now.