Cod Almighty | Diary

This season is dead! It is a dead season!

17 December 2025

Hello and welcome to the last BOTB Diary before Christmas and possibly the last one of 2025. I don't know. We're not a well-organised collective. 

If teams in our division are having a bit of a losing streak, there are usually two solutions: 1. sack the manager and employ a new one; or 2. play us. This never works for Town because, firstly, unlike every other team we never seem to have a new manager bounce, only a new manager bellyflop, and, secondly, we are us and we can't play ourselves. 

Bristol Rovers, the team currently keeping us off the bottom of the form table, have gone for the former option, and have appointed everyone's favourite wobblebottom Steve Evans. Our feelings towards the Scottish gutsbucket tend to be rather mixed: on the one hand, he's a chunky clown who wears eye-liner and usually gets sent off when he comes to the Blundells; on the other, he's going to rescue the Bristols from relegation because he organises teams and gets them playing above their capabilities. One suspects that centre-halves caught in possession or profligate forwards will find themselves in the garden incinerator, or at least down the job centre with the words 'feckin shite' scrawled on their CVs in fat handwriting. This is a man who suffers no nonsense. 

Nonsense, however, is what Town fans have been faced with for a while now. Deviant Diary on Monday was typically sanguine, laid back, chillaxed and unfazed by our current status, best described as 'actvely plummeting.' I'm fairly relaxed now, mainly because I've given up on everything but scraping enough wins to stay clear of relegation, and beating Weston-Super-Mare in the cup. Three rounds of the FA Cup, three home games against non-league opposition, plus two home games in the Caribou against Premier opposition. You can't accuse the footballing gods of being against us this season, can you? 

Doubtless Thursday's and Friday's diaries will cover Saturday's defeat to Bromley in more detail, but for now I'm going to have a rant about time-wasting.

Last Saturday the fourth official added on six minutes' injury time. This was despite their keeper being booked for time-wasting, on about the fifth occasion he'd done it, and a few stoppages, and each side making about 14 substitutions. Bit crap to start with. Then their player pretended to be injured for another two minutes approx, then they scored, and it took two minutes and 44 seconds before we kicked off again. I know, because, tragically for all those who hoped I'd one day come to something, I timed it. The ref blew the whistle after seven and a half minutes of injury time, leaving a total played of somewhere between three and four minutes.

Stoppages in injury time have to be added on otherwise the whole concept is pointless. I'm in no way claiming it would have made a difference to Saturday's result - indeed if he'd played the correct amount of injury time we probably would have lost 3-0. It just irks me. Have you ever been irked? If so, you'll know what I'm going through. 

As a final note, I was going to say that John Cleese, from Weston-Super-Mare, changed his name from John Cheese, making him the only comedian ever to have changed his name to something less funny for the sake of his career. However, Chat GPT tells me that it was his father that changed the name and that the comedian was actually born Cleese. I hope this doesn't ruin your enjoyment of the game. 

Lots of Christmas, New Year and football to come before then though. Stay safe and here's a hugely uninspiring picture to not get you in the mood for it all.