Cod Almighty | Diary

Ever get the feelin' you've been cheated?

13 November 2025

Here I am - I'm a street walkin' cheetah with a heart full of napalm. Your Guest Diarist might not have the haircut but the punk attitude buried deep in my psyche appears to have risen to the top as I wake up to another grey November day. It is a long wait from one match day to another and there is only the tiniest soupçon of news. What? Plough on through the rest of the babble and I'll get to it eventually.

First the non-news that in the make believe parallel universe where data rules Town have 3.59 more points than we have actually earned in real life games of football. Us actual fans who have watched the actual matches know instinctively that the Mariners have lost points from winning positions on a few (too many) occasions. So the great God data is probably cheating us out of more points than 3.59. The future, where the league table is measured to two decimal places, needs James Burke to come back and explain it on a Tomorrow's World special doesn't it?

If you are tragically bored try debating in your head the proposition that AI and VAR are very similar. Both try to provide reliable accurate decisions wth an air of legitimacy. Both fail miserably.

My week, in the absence of football, has been spent moving greenhouses and cleaning gutters. Incidentally, there is a 24 hour wet day forecast tomorrow. So the second go to fix the Blundell Park pitch will get its first severe test - we might get as much as two inches of rain. But on the gutter front my old house needs a triple ladder to get up to the front roof so I enlisted my mates Callum and Harry who do roofing for a living and race highly modified Land Rovers on Sundays. Apart from Harry's Dad being a Spurs supporter there was no football chat so we talked stories from the gutter at length. You can seal the joints with black sticky rubber compound but after a year or two even it goes hard and cracks. There are blokes going round who have a long pole with a vacuum cleaner and a camera who will tell you they can clean them in no time from the street with no ladders required. But all they do is loosen some of the encrusted crap which gets pushed along in the next big rain and blocks yer downpipe. How we laughed. There is no better time to make an old man feel useful than to foot a ladder for a knowledgeable young grafter. So don't use a grifter, get a grafter. Might sell that one to the folks at Checkatrade.

In the cacophony of disappointment following us losing a two-goal lead last week everyone seems to have forgotten how good the finish was from our man Greeny. Every season he always produces a moment of pure magic. That first time half-volleyed lobbed goal over the oncoming keeper and in off the underside of the bar was pure poetry. I hereby mention him in dispatches.

Finally, the news. At half twelve today young Soonsup Bell might make his debut for Thailand as they take on Singapore in a friendly. His Grandad is Thai. Let's hope he gets on, scores and enjoys himself. See yer.