Cod Almighty | Diary
They're fucking celebrating?
13 January 2025
Miss Guest Diary writes: Was there anyone in Lincolnshire who seriously thought Saturday's game would go ahead? Even the club, with their ultra-positive attitude, couldn't commit themselves to anything stronger than to say they "believed" the pitch was OK. I called it off for myself some time on Wednesday, seeing that the forecast was for it to get even colder and having just spent 20 minutes freezing my fingers off scraping a thick layer of ice off my car. Mr B refused to give up hope and set off around 10.15, bundled up in three layers of everything, having endured his own 20-minute car defrosting exercise. He'd just reached Middle Rasen when I broke the news and summoned him home. Optimist or masochist? I'll leave you to decide.
As is the way of things there was a mixture of criticism, I-told-you-so, and sympathy from Town fans on social media but the club obviously felt the need to justify themselves. Their statement doesn't contain much we couldn't already surmise, although I was intrigued by this sentence: Unfortunately, due to today's game being broadcast live on Sky Sports+, there wasn't an option to move the kick-off significantly beyond the planned kick-off time at short notice. The implication seems to be that the pitch would have been playable if the kick off was moved to 3pm but that, once a game has been selected for Sky, it must be played when they say so even if that means having nothing to broadcast due to cancellation. Or am I reading too much into that?
No Town game meant there was plenty of time to watch the FA Cup on TV – I managed five games in all, the most enjoyable of which was the crushing of the ex-Man U players' vanity project by Man City. The cherry on the top of that cake was the hat trick for James McAtee, younger brother of 'our' McAtee.
Of course the best moment of the weekend was seeing Harry Clifton score his penalty to put Hull out of the Cup; it's just a shame it wasn't in a Town shirt. Maybe one day…
Then there was the Tamworth vs Spurs game. Hilarious to see Premier League footballers struggling against the more robust style of the non-league team – they really didn't like it up 'em. Read Jonathan Liew's excellent and equally hilarious account in The Guardian. But we all knew that the magnificent feat of holding Spurs to 0-0 would be a waste of time, that the elite athletes would simply power past the part-time players in extra time. And so it proved. This match was a clear illustration of the unfairness of abolishing FA Cup replays, but no one at the top end of football cares about fairness any more, do they.
Meanwhile the transfer window is open, but you'd hardly know it from the news coming out of our club. They are holding their cards so close to their chest that we haven't even had any ridiculous rumours circulating this year. The only crumb of news has been about Geza Turi that Faroese chap who didn't have a passport, but now he does. But he won't be using it to come to Grimsby as his club have apparently turned down our offer of 400,000 krone. That sounds like a lot of money, but is apparently about £45,000 and, in today's world of multimillion-pound players, seems rather low even at our end of the football pyramid. He's a midfielder anyway – the one position which Town seem to have very adequately covered – so my shoulders are shrugging.
Roll on Saturday, we need to give Chesterfield's new signing Bim Pepple a chance to continuing his non-scoring run of form at Blundell Park.
UTM