Cod Almighty | Diary
Diary - Wednesday 19 May 2004
19 May 2004
The Graham Hockless fan club can breathe a little easier today with the news that Peter Taylor is not among their number. Yesterday's Hull Daily Mail reported that the out-of-contract winger could have walked out on the Mariners to sign for Kingston Communications, but the KCFC manager has thrown a wet, mouldy blanket over such speculation. "That's an unlikely one," Taylor is quoted in today's HDM. "There are cetain [sic.] positions that I'm looking for, but that one is news to me." I wonder how it all began, then. I mean surely it couldn't have been the player's agent planting a story that was bound to rile Town fans in order to hurry GTFC into improving their new contract offer. No, surely not. There's absolutely no way that could have happened. No way.
What else is happening? Well, if you type www.thisisgrimsby.co.uk into your web browser right now then you get something called "this is devon", so that's not a whole lot of use. But Graham Rodger's recent interview on Mariners World has found its way onto the less rarefied plane that is Town's humble official website, allowing the Diary a belated shufty. Not that there's much there worth seeing: Rozbo offers the blinding insight that "You can't start a season with six players" and describes the issue of whether he will apply for the position of GTFC manager as "an hypothetical question at this moment in time", which is patently untrue, unless Nicky Law has handcuffed himself to the hotseat with a sleeping bag and a sign saying NOT LEAVING UNTIL FORMALLY DISMISSED. The one interesting moment is when Our Graham is asked what he said to Phil Jevons on presenting him with his player of the year award, and replies: "I would rather keep that between me and Phil." This leads the Diary to the only logical and plausible conclusion - that Rodger asked Jevons: "Are you wearing the red basque and French knickers, honey, like you promised?"
Ah, the Grimsby Telegraph has started working properly now - and, flash bang wallop, breaks the news of more player releases. After a three-year spell with the Mariners that included 80-odd appearances, four goals and a failed trial with Wolves, Simon Ford is taking the next space shuttle out of Cleethorpes, having failed to live up to his early promise. Perhaps a little more surprisingly, Liam Nimmo and Andy Pettinger are on their way out (what did Pettinger do wrong, exactly - or is having two goalkeepers now considered a luxury?); but rather less unexpected is the confirmation that Mickael Antoine-Curier will be nothing more to the history of GTFC than a symbol of the chronic short-termism that characterised the club's decline in the early 21st century and severely marred the experience of supporting the team.
The Telegraph's stupid manager poll thing has finished, and typing www.thisisgrimsby.co.uk into your web browser now comes up with "this is south wales".
Felix Oliver-Tasker has emailed the Diary in response to yesterday's post from Si(mon) Wilson about the evils of squad numbers. "Stuck as I am in a time warp, where George Tweedy, Billy Cairns and Tommy Briggs were demi-gods," he writes, "squad numbers, shirts with players' names on them and outrageous goalkeepers' jerseys are the least of my worries. The likes of wing backs, centre-backs, up the channel and attacking full-backs, keeping the shape, etc are the terms I have difficulty in coming to terms with. I wish I really understood what it was all about. I heard a commentator on Radio 5 the other day saying that such and such a team had lost their shape. What he really meant was that they were playing crap football and were getting stuffed big time. Why do these pundits say all this garbage over the airwaves? Yes, by all means let's get back to 1-11 and goalkeepers in cloth caps and woolly rollneck jerseys." Aye, pay 'em tuppence farthing a year an'all, and make the buggers play wi' a bit o' coal for a ball!
Hertfordshire Mariner Mark Wilson, meanwhile, emails from "the Put Yourself in Another Man's Shoes department", to use his words. "Whilst I broadly agree with the scorn that you pour upon Wimbledon FC," he opines, "I would ask you not to be quite so vindictive. Some of us don't want to see them go out of business. Some of us live 35 minutes from the National Hockey Stadium and harbour (faint) hopes of Town being visitors to Milton Keynes so I can leave for a game at 2:00, be in the ground at 2:40 and home with a cup of tea by 6:00." When you say "some of us", Mark, what you really mean is you, isn't it? No, the Diary says boycott genetically modified football; and aren't you within spitting distance of Northampton, Rushden, Leyton Orient, Cambridge, Oxford and Wycombe anyway?
"By the way," asks Mark, "are the club ever going to fire/release the twat we have had the misfortune to call our manager?" Well, he wrote "tw*t", actually, but we're all big boys. The answer is I don't know, unless you're Graham Rodger, in which case it's just a hypothetical question.