Cod Almighty | Diary

Blandness stalks the land

22 July 2024

They were the Minstermen, full of Minster joys but made barely a Minster noise. They were the Minstermen, itty-bitty Minstermen who gave us a bit of a bash. They played in pink, and Twittertown melted down. Or to put it in black and white: it wasn't pretty.

Your ever-droll Deviant Diarist hot-footed up the highway not from Hull to the GARP Consumerism Stadium and couldn't help but roll his eyes at the splatterfest of ding-ding-dinging alarm bells. Eh, what, you ask, is the world according to GARP? The God Awful Retail Park, miles from anything, gleaming away in its pristine blandness crammed behind a swimming pool and a cinema. We were so lucky that The Fentycon was such a skilled operator. I hear that the café at the crematorium is quite nice.

So, are you appalled at being mauled next to the Monks Cross Mall?

The football. What football?

Town had an attack. One. Eventually. Well done young Cam. We didn't even score ourselves, they got bored and passed the ball into their own net for a laugh. And, always game for a laugh, Dear Old Lennie arose alone to fail to miss for once. That sound you hear is the hiss of the punctured pre-season promotion balloon. Too soon? You weren't there to see Bananarama mid-rankers tear our little boys apart. Smaller, weaker and slower, overpowered and outplayed. Appropriately for York, Town were an utter shambles.

There's a heck of a lot of work to do.

And the work started straight away. The lad Ladapo, Freddie's brother for short, is no more the hero of the hour for the erstwhile trialist B jogged around and he's likely to be no longer around giving off Will Bapaga vibes. For Tolu Ladapo the shrift is now short. Trialist C may escape the cull simply because no-one notices him on the bus whilst Henry, trialist A, is in danger of simply getting a free lift home to Wearside.

Our own players? As my old gran used to say: if you've nothing nice to say, say nowt.

There we are. There we were. Where was I?

I went to the Test Match on Friday. Tedious as heck. I noticed that the BBC highlights kept focusing on the very area, nay-nay, the very seat I was sat for crowd reactions. But yesterday, not on Friday. Somehow that feels so very Grimsby, like those Town fans at the Euros draping flags in the upper tiers and the stand from which the cameras were beaming.

Just like the Town players on Saturday, you know there is someone from Grimsby there, but you just can't see them in shot.

For Artell's Academy of Sports Science and Lots of Numbers there were no answers, only questions.