Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Tuesday 27 April 2004

27 April 2004

After negotiating the early release of Marcel Cas and Des Hamilton from their playing contracts this season, GTFC have done likewise with their sponsor Jarvis and officially announced their new deal with Young's. The local seafood company takes over just 12 months after the troubled engineering firm agreed a three-year sponsorship with the Mariners which looked shaky from the very start, as Stephen Venney - the Town fan, convicted fraudster and Jarvis employee who fixed up the deal - disappeared last year on his way to the press conference to announce it. Young's has tied itself to the Mariners for a two-year period, though no mention is made on Town's website of the fee involved, nor about the terms by which the Jarvis deal was terminated, though it can be assumed that GTFC will not have received the full £250,000 that it was reported to have been worth. Town's new shirt bearing the Young's logo looks great, with super stripy sleeves - although it is manufactured by Nike, the multinational notoriously linked to Far East sweatshops with appalling working conditions, poverty pay, underage workers and the denial of basic workplace rights.

Over to the Grimsby Telegraph, where a truly horrible letter today attempts to defend those 'supporters' who believe that the correct response to a struggling team is not to try and get behind it but to walk away. "If they went into a restaurant and their meal was less than satisfactory and the service was somewhat below average, would they go back to the same restaurant again in a hurry?" asks Scott Worboys of Rothwell, who will presumably be supporting silver-service Arsenal from now on. Scott concludes by making explicit the lightweight fan's eternal contradiction: "I wish the team well in their relegation battle - without my hard-earned money!" Tomorrow: the pilot who suffered vertigo and figured his passengers would be better off if he just parachuted out of the plane.

Miles Moss, finally, has discovered a translation website that produces a grimly amusing result when you use it to translate the Danish word 'grimsby' into English. Try it yourself!