Cod Almighty | Diary

"My wife's gone to the West Indies." "Jamaica?" "No, St Lucia actually."

11 June 2019

What's all this about Town fans responding negatively to the Matt Green signing? I haven't seen any disapproving comments at all, and the number of Town fans I've blocked on Twitter is only about 65.

The first thing you do when your club signs a striker is, understandably, to look and see how many goals he's scored. What's less understandable is to emphasise one season of relative underachievement ahead of a much more impressive career record. Better still, why not just admit that none of us really have any idea at all how a new signing will work out, and just wait and see how it goes? As suggestions go, I admit, it's a pretty wild one, but hey, sometimes you've just got to stop thinking outside the box and blow up the box with 1.21 gigawatts of highly volatile raspberry-flavoured polystyrene.

Your original/regular Diary never pays any attention to the other team's players, so I've no recollection of seeing Green play. I don't suppose he'll be as gloriously prolific for us as he was for Lincoln and Mansfield, because it just never seems to work out like that; but I'll be surprised if he doesn't better last season's fairly indifferent record of four goals in 31 appearances for Salford, or whatever it was. We just don't know. He probably won't be Clive Mendonca and he probably won't be Mike Jeffrey. By the same token, you don't have to be head cheerleader, Chemical Ali, Eeyore or Marvin the paranoid android. DEAL WITH IT.

A few centimetres separated Harry Clifton from a glorious international debut at the weekend. Town's mercurial homegrown midfielder came on at half time for Wales under-21s in Albania and had a chance to make it 2-2 in almost the last action of the match, only for his glancing header to drift slightly wide. Maybe he'll go one better this afternoon when, as the FA of Wales' website curiously puts it, "both sides will meet again", presumably as opposed to only one of the sides meeting again.

The Mariners' other international news of note is that Ahkeem Rose has been called up for training with Jamaica's under-23 set-up. I didn't even realise under-23 football was still a thing, but Town's newly superb new official website reports that our nippy young forward is currently in Kingston with the squad "ahead of planned practice games". Possibly not an actual cap in the offing, then, or at least not just yet, but still cause for joy, you will surely agree.

Without wishing to be overly negative, I have had more appealing offers even this lunchtime than the Stoke Sentinel's invitation to "Meet the 25 Port Vale fans sentenced following disorder at Grimsby Town". Dutiful diarist that I am, though, I have clicked through to attend the meeting so you don't have to. In attendance: 25 men being dicks. Apologies: unconvincing. Agenda: you can imagine. Action points: men, please stop being dicks. Any other business: no, really, men, please stop being dicks.

Last up today, we can be pretty sure one or two Grimbarians will next season develop an unprecedented interest in footballing matters surrounding a particular part of Cheshire, as top 'baller' and excellent human Nathan Arnold has returned to the game by joining Altrincham FC. Good luck to both player and club. We may not know much, but we know the Robins have just become even less bobbins. See yers.