Cod Almighty | Diary

The world is turning...hope it don't turn away

22 August 2024

It may be the season of mellow fruitfulness, and yes, your Guest Diarist has just come home to write this with armfuls of sweetcorn and other vegetables I won't bother to mention here (you heard maybe a bit too much about that yesterday), but there is summat akin to a howling gale blowing. And that's not good for Thursday night football is it? High winds are the best way to ruin a match. Second is annoying sun in your eyes; third is unexpected frost in the bagging area (think Swindon away when a half time freeze came to Town's rescue but made it a long old wasted trip). Fog I suppose, fog is never good and should be higher on the list - but there's no time to rewrite this. Anyroad.

Another recent moan of mine is fact-free match preview interviews. The interviewer regales the manager with inconsequential stats (think "the last time we beat County on a windy day was November 1952"), and then asks the manager to comment. Which is difficult for him without sounding rude, offhand or disinterested. But then doesn't ask whether anyone is injured, back from injury or whether the team have impressed in training. In my view Stats are very different from facts (discuss). And databases have made it so simple to drown sports coverage with stats that the proper questions don't make the cut. I suppose, grudgingly, this Matt Dean stat is worth repeating: Town have not had back-to-back league wins for 17 months. Erk.

Lastly I want to talk about match commentators. First I watched Town on their debut on SKY+ streaming. The first half was silent except for a disembodied voice occasionally saying the red light was on and other techie talk. When he finally realised he was LIVE on Sky sometime after the interval he was utterly useless. The sort that resorts to saying...every....word......really....slowly in every other sentence because he could not think of a single pertinent or amusing thing to say. Then we had a new bloke on Mariners TV for the Cheltenham game. He must have said the words 'Ryan Bennett' fifty times through the match (referring to the Cheltenham centre-back). it was not our Ryan but Scot Walker-Bennett wasn't it? And the other tic which became absolutely infuriating by the end was the way he always referred in commentary to our team as 'Grimsby Town'. Never Grimsby, or the Mariners or Town. To me that was a big lack of empathy sign. Hope the regular chap is back soon, his only fault is talking incessantly. I know long silences are a no-no on the radio but you have to pause now and then to let the game breathe. Miss you JT.

And my final postscript, apart from to say enjoy the game tonight, is to politely ask the club whether they have an internet problem. For the past two seasons Mariners TV has been brilliant but this season watchers all over the place (including me with my posh full-fibre dedicated internet link) are reporting screens freezing, glitching and breaking up. Please sort it as we are all on tenterhooks in case we miss a goal or summat good. Or summat bad.

Apart from that, everything's fine and dandy. See yer.