Cod Almighty | Diary

Diary - Thursday 27 December 2012

27 December 2012

Well, it's a very fine Christmas if you're a Grimsby fan. A crucial three points were taken from promotion rivals Wrexham on Friday night, and then three more candy points were taken from local babies Lincoln in yesterday's Boxing Day bout at Sincil Bank. It keeps us top of the league and everything is cushty.

With Hannah gone (for now) and Neilson gone (forever), it did make your West Yorkshire Diary wonder whether we had the goals in the team to deal with a sort of upwardly mobile Lincoln, if you could call them that. One solid team performance and four goals later, my doubts had been allayed. It seems this Town team just keeps grinding out results, whoever's in the team. So do we start hoping for a win at Mansfield too, or would we settle for a point given their pretty impressive home record? Perhaps we fans should match the team and start setting our sights a little higher - if you've got the balls for that sort of thing. I still feel scorched from the time I got excited in 2005-06 and ended it feeling as deflated as a penny floater in a Sidney Park bush).

You know, people say that things even themselves out in football. I don't actually believe that, but when Joe Colbeck scored directly from a corner it finally cancelled out the one I saw go in against us at Rochdale in March 2006 when Ricky Lambert curled his corner kick beyond his teammates, our seven-foot defence and Steve Mildenhall into the net in the fourth minute of injury time, which cost us two points and the fourth division's top spot. We then got hammered by Lincoln in the next match and our promotion hopes wobbled from there on in. So thank you, Joe Colbeck.

It appears that the Christmas cheer and goodwill extended from the club to Radio Humberside yesterday as Rob Scott granted John Tondeur an interview after the game. He's happy with his players and feels they've shown that the performances and the results haven't just been down to the loan players (although Nathan Pond was, again, outstanding at the back).

Presumably Imps boss David Holdsworth, who failed in all areas of this festive fixture by talking a good game but actually playing a very bad one, will be fining his players after they clearly didn't do their Christmas Day homework. If they had, then maybe three of them wouldn't have been lying on the ground in need of treatment within the first 10 minutes of the match.