Cod Almighty | Diary

Grimsby Town: the employer of last resort

24 November 2020

Casual Diary is not too sad to be unable to travel to Crawley tonight. It is an awful place.

In Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's book The meaning of Liff, Grimsby is defined as a bit of gristle in a stew or meat pie. If football matches could be described in the same way, then last Saturday's defeat by Tranmere would have been Crawley: devoid of all hope, soulless and with absolutely no redeeming features. The one thing that allows me to hang onto my belief that we will finish nearer the top than the bottom of the table after such a performance is that most of the same players won at Cheltenham and Orient.

A lot has been made of the post-match interview with Ian Holloway, especially when John Tondeur reminded him he has faced the same difficulties regarding Covid as anyone else. This is true, but Holloway has not been dealt the same hand as other managers. That is one reason why those few fans calling for him to be sacked and join the other 15 managers (including caretakers) in the John Fenty Hall of Failure are wrong. The team's progress from January to March is a better indication of his quality.

This is "his" squad now, but he could only do what he could to attract the best with the doleful cards he has been given to play with. We don't know his playing budget, and I'm not aware of other clubs having inserted a Covid clause into players' contracts: we don't know what it said but we can have a decent guess.

The rumour that furloughing players is being considered is further evidence of Town's direction of travel: we will leave aside the morality. Holloway has said he knows nothing about that, and it is not in his remit. Then there is the Bilel Mohsni farce: Holloway has said he had been assured by Fenty that the issue had been resolved when he told Tondeur on Saturday that Mohsni had already left Blundell Park. It beggars belief that such things are not discussed with the manager, especially when he is also a board member. I've absolutely no doubt that both ideas came from the Non Chairman.

It is precisely the sort of shithousery that Fenty and his apologists think makes him a good owner and chairman, and keeps the club safe. It is of course typical of his lack of vision and short termism. The Fenty view is that we will emerge from the pandemic in a fantastic position, financially strong. If that is true, it will be thanks to the fans, not the board. The same board which denied a takeover bid because they were unsure the prospective buyers "had the cash to see us through a downturn" have so far stumped up the princely sum of nothing since March. Meanwhile, those prospective have signed off on a deal to redevelop most of Grimsby town centre, minus the new stadium we could have had.

For players and coaches looking for a new club, we will be about as attractive as a second christmas to a turkey, the Amazon of football: an employer of last resort considered only by those with few other options. If, come next August, you have a choice of signing for a club which stood by its players and supported them through difficult times, or one which inserted Covid clauses and is apparently considering furloughing players who are injured or underperforming, who are you going to choose. Are you going to sign for a club when one of its players took to Twitter to state he had no idea that his contract had been cancelled?

This is why it irks me when Holloway says the club is fantastically run. He has been here five minutes. He hasn't spent £3,000 a season watching 16 years of failure. A fantastically-run club would not have spent six seasons out of the Football League with the ensuing loss of revenues. A fantastically-run club would not have spent the last 17 seasons in division four or below, when it had spent a mere 8 out of the previous 125 years in such a position. It would not have seen its core customer base plummet to 3,500. It would not reside in a poorly-maintained, dilapidated ground. Maybe Holloway should think of these things. He may not be quite so sure that we are so fantastically run next July when he is trying to sign new players.

When Holloway's predecessor, Michael Jolley left, Fenty said that the idea of Grimsby Town as a long-term project was only Jolley's take, and that success in football comes quickly or not at all. Fenty spoke with no apparent sence of irony or self-awareness. After 16 years of failure, isn't it high time he applied that axiom to himself? Time to go, John.

Fenty out.