Cod Almighty | Diary
The past is a foreign country
15 January 2026
After beating Weston-super-Mare and drawing Wolves at home in the fourth round of the FA Cup, I began hoping that there hadn’t been some kind of oversight or admin error in Tyrell Sellars-Fleming’s loan registration from Hull that would threaten our glorious victory. To be fair, he didn’t come on and miss a penalty in a shoot-out and already I’ve run out of parallels to draw on this, so I’ll just leave it there.
It goes without saying that, yes, we’d have absolutely ripped into the club for the Clark Oduor incident and added it to our spreadsheet of spectacular gaffs had it occurred under the watchful eye (or eyes, maybe he used both) of our previous chairman, or majority shareholder, or fraud facilitator, whatever he wants to be known as. But it’s not nearly as much fun to take the piss when you know the people running the football club are genuinely decent.
In Andrew Pettit’s recent interview with Radio Humberside — who remain very much unbanned from, and very welcome into, Blundell Park, despite Matt Dean’s rigorous questions — he shone a light on how much of a loss the club continues to operate at, and that future sustainability (in a world where every club has dropped anchor with rich benefactors and dubious owners) remains very much the focus. There is no sense that his, nor Lord Stockwood’s, investments are being called ‘benign loans’. They’re doing what every fan would if they had the means. They’ve been happy to put their money where their mouths are, but they also know (just as we all do) that for a brighter future — or any sort of future — we need to find a better way to make sure this 147-year-old endeavour keeps on trucking, for all of us.
The board has backed the gaffer in this transfer window with the funds to bring in Sellars-Fleming and Andy Cook, while Jackson Smith is also here until May. It’s always hard to know whether new additions are actually adding to the squad, until you reach the point where you realise they aren’t, and so it’s difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions just yet. But your West Yorkshire Diary doesn’t mind declaring that it looks like excellent business and if it doesn’t get us back into a big play-off tease then I’m Menno Willems.
Literally moments before he popped up with the winner at the weekend, I was declaring to whoever was in the room watching the match with me at the time that Kieran Green — known as ‘the guy who scored from his own half’ to my seven-year-old — had gone off the boil a bit in recent games. I also added (rather perfectly you’ll have to admit) that ‘I don’t know why we get so excited at corners because we never score from them’. Yes, it’d been well over 40 playing minutes since Charles Vernam curled one in from a short corner routine. The thing is, I also saw us score from a corner with my own eyes at Sheffield Wednesday and I seem to now remember us putting a decent one in against Manchester United from which Tyrell Warren scored. So, it just goes to show fans can’t remember anything unless it fits the narrative, and I’m as guilty as the next.
For those of us who watched last Saturday’s match on TV, the commentator mentioned the time our gaffer named a starting XI made up entirely of academy graduates when he was Crewe’s gaffer. While we’ve always been proud of the young players we’ve produced and nurtured over the years here, we’ve not been close to achieving anything similar. Maybe that’s just a result of football’s divisive high-stakes nature these days, in which things are only ever allowed to be incredible or crap. Still, it’s been heartening to get glimpses of Seb Auton, Fortune Onoh, Alex Graham, Henry Brown and most recently Elliot Smith this season and — cor blimey, guv’nor, if it wasn’t Captain Khouri who led the team to a win over Weston! He’s one of our own now, and I took great glee in telling him that he was the best No 8 on the pitch at the end of the Man Utd game. Having successfully buttered him up without even exaggerating, he then agreed to pose for me while I became the sort of fan boy I never thought I was and took a selfie. And I don’t do selfies, so you can tell how I was feeling at that precise moment.
What I’m (slowly) getting around to saying is that our youth team continue to be showing great form and progress this season, and if we don’t get to celebrate the emergence of a striker called Ted Sharp then something is very wrong with the world.
Just another daily diary with two casual references to the Man Utd victory in it. Effortless. UTM!