Cod Almighty | Diary

Hey, ho, let's go

20 September 2018

Today the football club and the council issued a joint statement to bring fans of the Mariners and residents of North East Lincolnshire up to date on the situation with Town's proposed new stadium – delightful timing for your West Yorkshire Diary who'd tried to get ahead of his writing duties by drafting out today's words well in advance. And, of course, none of them were anything to do with the new stadium.

So apologies for the brevity of today's diary. I've read the joint statement only once because time is becoming an increasingly precious commodity as I work my way through my thirties. And I actually want to leave the office to get some lunch before I get buried under more work this afternoon.

It's not a long statement and I'm sure all Town fans will have either read it by now or at least heard about it, so I'm certain it'll get critiqued in depth on Twitter, the Fishy and, quite possibly, down the pub for old times' sake. But essentially it seems to acknowledge and admit that the project at Peaks Parkway has been difficult and, since a few years have passed and, you know, stuff has happened, they're willing to re-look at the location of a new stadium in partnership with the council.

There are, of course, no guarantees – and I've been reading any statement made by the club (jointly or otherwise) with such a large pinch of salt that it's been slowly increasing my blood pressure – but the early signs appear to be positive. As positive as they can be if you truly believe in the vision of a Freeman Street stadium that will breathe new life into a town that's pretty much on its knees.

So it appears John Fenty is open to the idea of removing the heels he dug into the Peaks Parkway turf all those years ago (if only to refute claims that no sod had been cut there) and is willing to work with others on delivering something everyone in the area feels passionately about. This must be acknowledged and applauded.

But I'm not going to get too excited by this – Fenty's previous actions are directly responsible for my overly-cautious disposition to most things about GTFC. I'd love to fast forward six months to see what the situation is – but, while I continue to work on my magical time machine, I'll at least try and appreciate that this is good news and a good move by the club, and that they have (finally) responded to a lot of rumours that had gathered a lot of pace over the last couple of weeks. Maybe, just maybe, in the not-too-distant future, we can realise our dream. And maybe today was the start.

UTM!