Cod Almighty | Diary

Why be first when you can be twenty-first?

28 March 2024

Remember Richard Hughes? He joined Town on loan from Portsmouth at a tumultuous time when the club was battling against relegation. Sorry, I’ll need to be much more specific here — when the club was battling against relegation from the second division in 2003.

Ringing any bells? He played a dozen games for the Mariners and scored one solitary goal, almost accidentally, in the final game of the season when Town drew 2-2 against Brighton in front of the Sky cameras. Still nothing?

Okay, this’ll do it. Your West Yorkshire Diary remembers him for having half a finger missing. I read it in an article about him when he first arrived and haven’t been able to forget about it since. Surely you know who I’m talking about now.

Anyway, the man is wielding supreme power at Liverpool these days. Intelligent, multilingual, and with his finger on football's pulse (not the missing one), he’s currently figuring out the Reds’ post-Klopp world while we’re figuring out how to stay in the Football League. Again.

I was trolled by a Richard Hughes a few years back when the Fenty PR machine was in full swing. I’m not saying the incoherent childish ramblings were written by the Richard Hughes we’re talking about here. I mean, I don’t know much about the bloke, other than that finger thing (still thinking about it), but I can be pretty sure he wasn’t a Fenty acolyte who liked isolating and targeting peripheral football blogs to take issue with the author’s take on why Grimsby Town keep losing all the time.

Tomorrow the Mariners trek to Barrow. Decent side, in fairness. That gag doesn’t work so well written down, nor does it work that well in North East Lincolnshire where the ‘air’ pronunciation in ‘fairness’ gets shoved so far up the back of the mouth it almost pops out through the nose and has no close resemblance to 'Furness'. My wife (not from Grimsby) once asked me what a ‘staring wheel’ was, and I had to tell her I meant ‘steering wheel’. She also laughed every time she heard John Moore shout ‘Hearn!’ on commentary.

We laughed about a lad from Hull being given pink 'girlie' gloves for Christmas, and we once asked a Geordie to say 'Is there an Ikea near here?' for our own amusement. Are there any quintessentially Grimbarian words or phrases that bring out our unique accent? Please let us know; you know we love this type of stuff.

If you want to see how each fourth division team has fared since the transfer window closed, I’ll save you the bother because it's a horrendous website with ads that force the content to jump around like a six-year-old who's just discovered his first energy drink. Town are still 21st. Only Colchester, Notts County and Swindon have been worse than us since the end of January. The piece was concocted by the Doncaster Free Press, presumably upon discovering Donny sit second in this particular table.

That’s it for today. I’d write more but I’m short on time, I’m out of ideas, and I want to do very little this afternoon before my child is returned to me by his school for the next two weeks.

UTM!