24 hours from Pyewipe

It's a decade and a half since Town first made plans for a new stadium. The council has now given up and said several times "yes, alright, build the thing – just stop bothering us!" But at no point have the supporters been given a chance to tell our club what we think the Fentydome should be like.

The location and overall design of the stadium seem finalised. We can't afford anything nicer than a cheap shed, exactly the same as Shrewsbury's and Doncaster's and every bugger else's, and we can't build it anywhere other than Great Coates because there's no other set of local residents we want to annoy more.

But there are other considerations in the overall matchday experience (leaving aside the actual quality of the football). It must still be possible to enjoy a match at an ugly, sterile ground in a barren post-industrial wilderness; otherwise Scunthorpe's attendances would be even lower.

So let's see the fans get some say on what goes inside the ground. And Mr Fenty could probably use our help, preoccupied as he has been with many other concerns. Only this week Ofcom threw out his complaints against Radio Humberside's coverage of their dispute with the club over broadcasting rights. Some might add that if any organisation deserves a reprimand from a communications watchdog, it must be the one that boasted its new stadium would offer "synergies with Europarc" and then proudly urged fans to go to its brand new website and "check it our".

In January last year the club launched a spectacular multimedia website at www.gtfcnewstadium.co.uk, where the theme from Star Wars launched visitors into a breathtaking 3D virtual reality tour of the ground. I'm absolutely sure they must have paid the copyright holder all the rights and performance fees for the music; it's just a shame that they seem to have forgotten to renew the web address when it expired on 29 November, because visitors to the site now are met with a flat and empty expanse of grey – much like the scene that will greet visitors to the site for the new stadium, in fact.

This just leaves the other new stadium website at extra-gtfc.co.uk/newstadium – where we discover a ringing endorsement for the project from the team manager. "I have seen the blueprint and I think it is superb and ideally located just off the A180. It is so accessible and a lot of thought seems to have gone into it," says Russell Slade.

If the Fentydome is to be anything other than appalling, Town must invite suggestions from the people who have to use it. And then the club must prove to be a lot better at building and maintaining stadiums than they are at building and maintaining websites.

Labels: communications, doncaster, fentydome, internet, new stadiums, radio, scunthorpe, shrewsbury, slade, websites

Some people are determined that there's nobody worse off than them. This is the premise behind Monty Python's famous Four Yorkshiremen, who argue over which of them had the most deprived childhood. Rather less well known is the sequel, Four Yorkshiremen and a Yellowbelly, which ends like this:

Fourth Yorkshireman: "We 'ad to live in a shoebox, get up at two in t' mornin', work 29 hours a day down t' mill, and when we got home our dad would slice us in two wi' t' bread knife."
Yellowbelly: "You think that's bad? We 'ad to go an' watch Grimsby Town."

If you look at the balance sheets, though, there are quite a few clubs worse off than the Mariners. But debt seems to work in a strange way in football. Swindon are £5m in the red but this didn't stop them signing Chris Blackburn, Miguel Comminges, Kaid Mohamed, Steve Adams, Jon-Paul McGovern and Billy Paynter in the summer. Coventry's debt totals around £38m yet they maintain a second-flight squad of almost 30 players. And Town are pretty much unable to sign anyone because the club still owes HM Revenue & Customs about £350,000.

Another way to gauge who's worst off is to listen to football phone-ins on the radio. These don't give a very accurate picture, however, as they are invariably dominated by lengthy rants about their underperforming, poverty-stricken clubs by supporters of Fulham or Wolves.

But if you go by the league table, there are only four Football League clubs worse off than the Mariners. This is Dagenham & Redbridge's first ever season in the league, though, so they're probably enjoying it more than we are. Someone needs to tell them it starts losing a bit of its sheen after 107 years.

Lincoln are unexpectedly struggling after a string of top-seven finishes since 2003. But at least our county neighbours can take comfort from the fact that they are unlikely to suffer the heartbreak of defeat in the promotion play-offs this season.

The other two sides really are in trouble. Wrexham's former chairman tried to evict them from their ground, and then they dropped into the fourth division because of the 10-point penalty incurred by entering administration. Then they came within a week of being thrown out of the league. Still, they stayed up last season at the expense of Boston, so it's not all bad.

Probably the worst off of all are Mansfield, this weekend's visitors to Blundell Park. The Stags are still owned by the reviled Keith Haslam, who took interest-free loans out of the club and paid himself a handsome salary for running it. As they kick off tomorrow bottom of the league, many of their supporters would say he has run it into the ground.

Labels: coventry, dagenham, debt, finances, fulham, lincoln, mansfield, monty python, poverty, swindon, wolves, wrexham

So here we are in the pit of despair. Languishing in the depths, with little cause for hope. Arriving at the lowest and bleakest point in an inevitable sequence of long-term decline set in motion by a critical succession of poor executive decisions and sustained by a culture of churlish support and inflated expectations. But enough about the England team – what are Town's chances of turning the season around?

Watching England began for me as a light relief from the hard slog of supporting Grimsby. After travelling for hours and spending a fortune to watch the Mariners lose 4-0 at Watford or Birmingham, and then feeling miserable as hell for the next week, it was a low-risk emotional investment to watch England on the telly. It was a chance to back a team that might actually win something, and if they didn't, well, it wouldn't hurt like when Town get relegated.

But then I realised why Town would never be as competitive a side again as they were under George Kerr and Dave Booth, when I first started going. TV and attendance money was shared out much more evenly between clubs, and in 1984 we finished fifth in what is now called the Championship. This can never be repeated because the rich clubs decided to keep all the cash by forming the Premiership.

And then, when you're watching England, you're supposed to support players from the Premiership – the very organisation that took the bread from Town's mouth.

Paradoxically, it's also less attractive to watch the national team because it's no longer very different from watching Grimsby. Only a fool would still describe England as "a team that might actually win something". After Israel beat Russia, for example, and England briefly had a chance again to qualify for Euro 2008, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard immediately talked up their chances of winning the tournament.

There were also shades of England in Russell Slade's Mariners team. Specifically, in that season we were awarded about 80 penalties and from only one of them the ball didn't end up in the North Sea.

Most pertinent of all is the issue of management. Managers of both England and Grimsby have to try and motivate players who would sooner be elsewhere – at England, back with their Premiership sides; at Grimsby, with clubs that have nice warm changing rooms and fans who don't jeer every misplaced pass.

And for both teams, of course, the big risk involved in changing managers is that none of the candidates whose names are the first to be mentioned have any interest at all in taking on an impossible job. Martin O'Neill is staying at Villa, Arsene Wenger won't leave Arsenal, and Nigel Clough is having another fine season at Burton Albion.

Labels: booth, clough, england, failure, gerrard, kerr, lampard, managers, o'neill, premiership, slade, wenger