Lex

FT 3-0 Another Parkhead pumping to add to the list. Good first half, shocking second and therefore well pumped. One point from our last four going into the split. Reminds me a bit of last season, when we were in a good position and ended the season with eight games without a win and finished sixth. Unless we start playing much better, that’s going to happen again.

What a player Foden is, B’Alon Dor potential.

Fair play for somehow making Hearts the victim here.

FT 1-2 Limped over the top six line with a loss again then, just like last season, thanks Saintees! Plenty happened second half at least. Looked like another Hemming howler to me for their second goal but will need to see it again. Gogic messed up twice that led to chances for Hearts, neither taken. Then a lovely counter attacking goal by Olusanya, which you don't often get at 0-2 down. Seemed that the VAR penalties would be levelled up when the ref got sent to the screen to check a foul on McMenamin. They always get given when they get sent to the screen, right? Wrong. Sums up our luck with VAR this season. Regardless, we were rubbish today and thats a really bad result at home against team with nothing to play for and our form poor form continues. We will need to improve hugely post split if we are going to get Europe.

HT 0-1 Been a rubbish game, wind is running it really. Both teams have been poor and there haven’t really been any chances. We had the wind behind us all half, cunningly decided not to use it to our advantage at all. Free kick on the half time whistle there and a chance to hang a ball up in the wind. Decided to play it short, messed it up, then it was half time. Summed the half up. The VAR handball penalty for Hearts is the only thing that’s really happened. Eyes on Easter Road second half, hopefully Saintees hold on. Can’t see us coming back to win this with the wind in our face second half - hope I’m wrong!

Hopefully we don’t get three goals wrongly disallowed this time.

Correct it is over. The Scottish independence movement will go the same way as the Quebec one. A slow and steady slide into obscurity.

Artificial how? The two of them have much more fans than everyone else. They've got over 100,000 season ticket holders between them, that's far more than every other Scottish club combined. Their income is considerably higher than everyone else and that's why they win everything, and will continue to win everything, regardless of league format or FFP.

Money is thrown about at part time level all the time. There’s obviously plenty of small investors willing to do that for various local reasons and becoming the best part time club in Scotland isn’t difficult. None of those clubs will ever play in the top flight. I was referring to the full time game, where the sums needed are very different.

Agree with this. FFP in Scotland would just solve a problem that sadly in a way, just doesn’t exist. It’s like building a fence to keep out the wolves, when the wolves went extinct over 10 years ago, with the failed Mileson and Romanov experiments. Many examples show this, Stewart Gilmour was desperately trying to sell St Mirren for over a decade, it ended up having to be the fans buying him out. Already mentioned the Browns troubles in trying to offload St Johnstone and I’m sure we’ve all seen the video of Motherwell whoring themselves for ‘investors’ on social media. No one of any proper means is interested in investing in any of these clubs, all of whom are secure in the top flight and debt free, there just are no wolves for FFP to keep out. The reason for this came up on a Q&A with the Hollywood Wrexham investors. I didn’t see it but I believe they were asked if they considered investing in a Scottish club before they chose Wrexham. They said they looked at it and concluded it was not a viable investment. It would be easy to make any club in the 42 the third force in Scotland without much investment, but anything beyond that just isn’t realistically achievable. With Wrexham, they’ll see what similarly sized clubs are doing in the EPL just now and think that there’s no reason that won’t be them within 10 years, and then they may be able to sell for a profit. Point is anyone with serious money to invest in football isn’t going to choose to invest in Scottish football, why would they? FFP just stops the much dreamed of and very rare rich fan putting his cash in. This further helps to maintains the status quo, which is not really endangered anyway.

I doubt it would make much difference to be honest. I feel the days of clubs grotesquely overspending in Scottish football are over. We’ve seen Rangers, Hearts, Motherwell and Dundee shamelessly cheat with varying levels of success, but that was all over 10 years ago now. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in Scottish football that would entice financial doping to that extent anymore. If you throw money at any club in Scottish football you’re just throwing it down the drain. See the trouble a really well run club like St Johnstone are having attracting a buyer. No outsider is interested because there is no prospect of progression for clubs like that so no way they could ever be sold on for a profit. it’s different in the lower reaches of English football which is rife with over spending, but that’s because they’re chasing the EPL gold. It works sometimes too, see the likes of Bournemouth and Brighton who have went from financial basket cases to two of the richest clubs in the world in the last 20 years. All that financial fair play would do in Scotland would be to consolidate the gap between the old firm and anyone else. It would stop any investor/Euromillions winner coming in and throwing money at a diddy club in order to break their duopoly. But that ain’t happening anyway, so no matter.

Nope we were not, I don’t think we were the only team that done it that day either. Works both ways too. I can’t remember the exact details of this but an ex chairman of ours passed away a few years ago, I think it was Bob Earlie, but happy to be corrected by a Saints fan who recalls this better than me. He was an elderly gent who hadn’t been around the club for a while, but in his day he had spent years of his life doing a lot of good work for us. The kind of guy who is absolutely deserving of recognition at a game. He wasn’t of the social media generation and essentially his death was missed by the club. A bit of understandable upset from friends and family ensued and there was then retrospective acknowledgement. Things like this is why I think we just need to do the tribute every home game. There’s never going to be less tributes, but it’s went so far we just now offend the families of people who don’t get the tribute, many of whom are more deserving than the ones that do.

That's a nonsense to be fair. The concept of a team finishing midtable in the league and being able to get promoted needs binned. At the most the playoff should be the winner of 2nd v 3rd to play 11th. Or, even better, just 2nd v 11th.

Don't think the format makes any difference to the Old Firm really. The previous one was a ten team league playing 36 games, this is two extra teams and we play 38 games. They still play each other four times every season and still finish 1st and 2nd almost every season. There's no change in format that could stop them running away with the league every year. Do agree with kicking them out though.

It's not perfect, no league system is, but it suits our game fine. It's been in place for a good while now and I suspect it will for a good while more, doesn't seem to be any real appetite amongst the clubs for any kind of reconstruction. Of course apart from Hearts when they got relegated in 2020, reconstruction suddenly became very pressing issue to them then, funnily enough they've went strangely quiet on it since they got promoted. It has created a meaningless achievement for middling top flight clubs of 'top six', and I say this as a fan of one club who will probably 'achieve' it this weekend. We never used to celebrate getting top six before the split was invented and I guess it will stop being lauded when the split is finally done away with, but there's no harm in clubs aiming for halfway up the league, I suppose.