As Greavsie used to bumble out to a constantly unimpressed looking Ian St John, "it's a funny old game"

A pretty barmy one too given yesterday's events, with Mansfield Town being told that they have to reduce the capacity of their Field Mill ground because club chairman James Derry handed in his P45 over the weekend and ran off with the club's safety certificate.

I mean, where's Robin of Sherwood when you need him?

Strange - only last week was I flicking through the 1975 Safety at Sports Grounds Act (as a bit of gentle night time reading, you understand), which states that as the Stags' Safety Certificate Holder, Derry is solely responsible for upholding safety regulations (it doesn't say those specific words, I've used some journalistic licence there, but you get the jist). So the long and short is that if he goes (which he did), so too does the certificate (which it has).

The all-new less-singing less-dancing 4,684-capacity Field Mill (down from 10,000) wouldn't normally prove a problem for a club whose dwindling attendances aren't aided by the fact that Mansfield is the largest town in the UK without a railway station, but the managerless outfit had hoped to attract a bumper crowd to last night's vital basement showdown at the arse end of League Two with Wrexham.

There's a further sick irony in that Derry's replacement is none other than Tony Egginton who you'd imagine, as Town mayor, would have enough influence at Nottinghamshire County Council to swing a few favours - not that we condone that sort of thing at Open Goal.

The club had also slashed ticket prices in order to nudge nearer their season's best of 6,258, so with more bad omens than Blockbuster Video, it was all set up for the Welshmen to grab a hotly-disputed last-minute penalty to confirm decisively that luck is no lady, but a fella with the beer sweats in a broken down lift.

But alas no, Mansfield won 2-1, in front of only 3,435, which makes the suggestion of forlorn fate raised in this column largely redundant, along with its author, no doubt.

Not such a funny old game after all ..