Leaderboard

Soundtrack is from inside Craig Gordon's head after the missile.

Like watching Big Brother live at 2am in 2004.

Without trying to be too wanky about this (but probably failing), I think what's going on here is really revealing about the psychology of the Old Firm, on two key levels: 1) Their perception of the power that they feel their strength in numbers gives them. 2) The fact that they feel their sheer spending power gives them a hold over the rest of Scottish football. What Saints have done undermines both of the above and you can see how much it has wounded their fragile pride. Firstly, you can't do whatever you want just because there's more of you and secondly we don't want your money. The most affronted responses all have one or both of the above at heart. They're astounded that we would turn their money away, and/or they're annoyed because we are giving our own fans priority over them. St Mirren have shat on two of the things that they enjoy most about being Old Firm fans and it's fantastic. Not every club of our size is in a position to take this action (we barely are, tbf, hence the plea for contributions) but I really hope we can make it work, and I hope it shows other clubs that it can be done as well. As we see the financial disparity tip even further towards the cheeks (after last night's result), it's more important than ever to take action such as this where it's possible to do so.

Scottish fitba’. Gemme’s a bogey. The two disproportionally large clubs in our small country, who already have all the power, money, biggest crowds, and a stranglehold on the rest - just motored even further out of sight, with the tribute act also qualifying for the Champions League group stages tonight. I think that’s it. I might be wrong. Who knows, or really cares. No-one was ever going to challenge them again anyway, Champions League money or not.

This directive from Div has been largely ignored. Topics will be reopened shortly. There will be zero tolerance from now on. Suspensions and permanent bans will be issued irrespective of what side of the debate you're on for any and I mean any abusive posts. This section of the board is an absolute disgrace.

That score graphic is exactly how you’d expect BBC Scotland to show aggregate.

???

I've changed my mind. Let's keep him

The quality of Scottish football outside the OF is English league 2 level. This is the level of player that is signed by non OF clubs which makes it the level. Most people don't follow football for the standard or we would definitely not get the highest crowds per capita in Europe. Without the OF would we even need as big a TV deal? They swallow up the vast amount of money anyway so it wouldn't need to be as big for the clubs to receive the same amounts they are already getting. We are getting 5 teams in Europe this year due to the coefficient which is on a peak amount, it will drop back to 4 within a couple of years. Malta and the Faroes get 4 teams in Europe so our coefficient would have to be as bad as San Marino to only get 3. The OF take 2 spots anyway so without them we would actually get more non OF teams in Europe. Motherwell and Killie have lost to Irish and Welsh teams recently, so having the OF how is it helping us outcompete these nations? Hibs, Hearts and Aberdeen would be the big 3 but they absolutely would not dominate like the OF. In my view I would accept less money and a lesser profile league to see it become more competitive.

Yeah, it’s a problem that we have a duopoly rather than a big three. If Aberdeen had a 50,000 fanbase, fan clubs around the colonies, could appear in the Champions League group stages, could sign guys like Jota and Virgil Van Djyk, and sell them to the EPL for millions, then aye, it would be better. Fcuking Stevie Wonder and Andrea Bocelli could see it would be better. Can you show me where I said three genuine competitors increases competition dramatically? I said it makes things better than here. Where’s our Atletico Madrid? I can show you our Real Madrid and Barcelona. Clue - they’re in the West and East of Glasgow. For fcuk sake, those two have their own dressing rooms in the National stadium of our country. The actual fcuk sake of that. If one of them plays a diddy in a cup final, no matter what diddy, the ugly gets their own, traditional dressing room. Oh, and take your childish ‘minter’ pish and shove it.

Parklife

Here someone else make another post about a pretend goal. It’s great banter.

Someone do there’s been a goal joke because no one has and it will be really funny.

Sent off for diving you say?

Ah well, In for a Penney, in for a pound

A huge led screen mounted onto the Wallace tower saying support your local football team .f**k the old firm .that's what I wanna see.

I mean, without being disrespectful, your 25 fans are utterly irrelevant and we don't really care. It'd also be better getting in touch with the club so you can be ignored or told officially that we don't care than crying about it on a multi-club forum.

I have never heard commentators white knight a team like McLean and McFadden have hearts tonight. the gorgie roar

Speaking here as a diehard ' junior fan ' from north ayrshire who would class rangers as my second team and also as someone who knows ally love personally then I would have to say that ally is a really decent guy in life who I speak to from time to time , yes he's been rash here , however he's not the type at all to go out and ' do ' someone and he's a good guy who doesn't deserve the death threats and what's came his way . Of course if he could turn the clock back then he probably wouldn't have lunged in the way he did but tell me a single footballer who has never done something that he regrets out there on the pitch ? He's certainly not a hatchet man In any shape of form and rangers have had a few of them In souness , hurlock, Brown etc etc

Ahem

Because he isnt an Old Firm sycophant nor has he ever played for them like nearly every other pundit. Most of their fans live in a world where its 'us' or 'them'. He has taken up the mantle of 'them' because he dares to criticise the club/fans in a way that very few pundits have ever done. Add in that he is very openly a supporter of independence and it just adds to his enemy status. I like him.

Thats no way to talk about your Irish day trippers.

Quite ironic, and pleasing, that their qualification for the champions league bumps up the UEFA money that the club will receive by £200K (to £600K). More than enough to make up for their welcome absence from the Fitzy family stand.

Must be quite the task for him, I received a call this morning too following an email I sent to him. Seems like a decent guy and can tell he wants to improve the link between the supporters and the club. just for transparency, my email is below. StevieMay17 said it much better than I ever could but felt compelled to say something too. I’m not convinced things will change unless people make their feelings known. Hello Ian, I hope this email finds you well. Please accept my apology for contacting you directly, I have been contemplating sending an email for a while but feel, given the tone of your statement following Scott Boyd’s announced departure, that I now had to get in contact in respect of how the team is being managed as I certainly don’t want my continued attendance at matches as an endorsement of the unity you mentioned in the statement. I renewed my season ticket this year with absolutely no enthusiasm. I feel like this has been taken as a vote of confidence in what’s happening at the club but honestly, it’s not. My son was born in April so I wanted to get him his first season ticket and Davidson made promises that things would improve this season, that he would be more flexible and that we’d attack more, those were my motivations for renewing my season ticket, and below are just a some examples of why the manager no longer has my support. Firstly, it’s only fair to acknowledge the cup double was an incredible achievement and everyone at the football club deserves enormous credit for doing so, chiefly Callum Davidson for leading us to such unexpected and unrepeatable success. Some of the issues were present that season - 9 home goals scored in 19 games being the lowest recorded in a season in Scottish senior football history, at any level. Finishing 5th and winning two cups seems even more miraculous given than backdrop, perhaps a warning that the success was unsustainable. All of the above makes The downward trajectory since then even worse. It has been horrible to watch from the stands, like a slow motion tail spin that we are not able to get out of. There’s many factors for this but pretty much all roads lead back to decisions made by the manager. Losing McCann and Kerr last summer - McCann for a very low price considering his talent, impact on the team and the length of time still on contract - certainly a factor in that, but the manager’s recruitment policy outside of that was incredibly short term. From the outside looking in, it felt like he was trying to keep things ticking over whilst he waited for his move. Perhaps that’s not what happened, if not then frankly the manager’s judgment on what makes a good player should also be seriously called into question. That quickly proved to be folly as we were first drawn into the relegation battle and then in danger of being cut adrift at the bottom. The board thankfully sanctioned a spending spree to save us, although again it was Hendry returning from his loan that gave us the impetus to stay up more than anything, yet another example of the manager’s questionable judgment along with signing the likes of Ciftci. I really can’t understand why Hendry would be sent out on loan whilst other strikers who contributed very little remained at the club. I also can’t understand the manager sanctioning signings which have cost the club 6 figures, yet neither has been given a run in the team (in the brief outings, neither Bair or Mahon look particularly good so that may be why, but then why is the manager pushing to spend a fortune on players he either didn’t know enough about or didn’t think were up to it?) This summers signings don’t really look much better. We lost 5 cup winners in the summer and each of the replacements look like significant downgrades on the players who have left, and given where they have come from are likely to be costing more than the ones who have left. The manager has said he wanted experience to replace experience, but he seems to have completely missed that you don’t need to be in your mid 30s to have experience, much of the experience who left were in their mid 20s. Most of the new guys will be on their last contract and I struggle to see what the motivation is other than picking up a wage every week. We’ve gone from having 5 or 6 sellable assets last summer to having none. I also can’t understand why the manager has signed 11 players and is still talking about signings in the plural, when he specifically said at the start of the summer he wanted to sign 4-6 new players. I’d also question the make up of the squad. We currently have 32 first team players, yet we have one recognised right back and 2 fit strikers who have managed one league goal between them in this calendar year. You look at the bench and there’s essentially nothing there that can change the game in our favour. All the players seem very similar to me, or are so far out of the picture that they’ll not get much of a chance to change a game even if they do make the bench. How many other clubs in the top flight would want the bulk of our squad? There’s a few notable exceptions but the vast majority would be taking a step down from Saints if they were to leave. No doubt our wage budget is much higher than it was under Tommy Wright, yet the strength of the squad is much weaker. I really wish another manager had been allowed to spend the money Davidson has. This has become a bit of a ramble, apologies for that, so I’ll just briefly outline other issues: - the manager has inexplicably wed himself to a system that doesn’t work and hasn’t really worked at any time since he came in. We started with the 5-2-3 at the beginning of Davidson’s reign, but changed to a 3-5-2 which worked much better in the second half of the cup double season. Since then we’ve reverted back to 5–2-3 which doesn’t work. We don’t score goals, we don’t create chances, teams know how we’re going to play and most easily nullify us and there is precisely zero entertainment for a Saints supporter most weeks. 6 shots on target in our first 4 league games is disgraceful. We seem happy to just sit in and play for a 0-0 draw every week which is awful too. Davidson seemed to think the first half performance against Aberdeen on Saturday was good, it wasn’t. It was terrible to watch, we created nothing. - the number of strain related injuries we pick up. I don’t know what’s happening at training, but there’s no way we should be picking up so many hamstring, thigh strains, calf strains etc. 2 this week with McPherson and Montgomery, 4 hamstring type injuries in quick succession at around the time we played Aberdeen at Pittodrie in around February last season. These injuries are not bad luck, as much as the local press and the manager try and tell us they are. - downbeat attitude towards our club. We’re the 2nd most successful club in Scottish football over the course of the last decade, yet the manager continually talks us down rather than trying to build us up. Previous managers have always talked us up and I’ve always felt that contributed to our success. It galvanised the players and the supporters, gave us a sort of siege mentality. Davidson just talks down our achievements - beating Inverness over two legs being a bigger achievement than winning the double the comment that rankles the most - talks down our chances against the city clubs, accepts mediocre players and performances and tries to make out that they’re acceptable ‘for a club like St Johnstone’. That’s just not on, of everything this depresses me the most. Why is that mindset acceptable and continually perpetuated? We’ve played 8 competitive games now and it’s just a continuation of last season with absolutely no effort to be more flexible and there’s virtually no attacking intent and frankly enough is enough. I’ve never felt so disconnected to the club that I love and I’m sick of going to the games out of a sense of habit and duty, knowing that the football will be terrible, we won’t try to win and we’ll probably get beat without giving the opposition anything to worry about. I can honestly say I regret renewing my season ticket and won’t be next summer if things don’t change, I’m already having to talk myself into going every week, and I’ll not continue doing so for much longer if things don’t change. The fact this manager is still going to be signing players is a dreadful thought too. The Sunday Mail reported that we’ve got an offer in for Robert Snodgrass - 35 in September - and I’ve heard a couple of strikers mentioned who are also over 30. If we do sign them, we’ll have 15 players who are over 30 or who turn 30 this season, and the bulk of them are contracted until 2024. How is that in any way sustainable for any football club, never mind a small one with limited resources? I don’t like calling for people to lose their jobs and I’m sorry that it has come to this, but I can see no reason why Callum Davidson is still in post. There’s a multitude of red flags and more seem to be appearing all the time. We get beat most weeks, play Rubbish football, terrible, lazy recruitment, players constantly getting injured, poor interviews in the press, outwardly negative attitude towards the club. The double was an incredible achievement and he will always be a club legend but that shouldn’t buy him time indefinitely. He’s been given so many chances and resources yet refuses to change. Results haven’t improved, performances haven’t improved and those already recruited don’t really give me much confidence of a better season this time round.

You, obviously. I just got a 6 month AA coin last night. Have you managed 6 months without alcohol (let alone 6 months as an admitted alcoholic who’s been drinking for over 40 years)? No? Then you can happily argue that you disagree with my views on your zombie team but fucking stay away from the drinking accusations. I’d label you with many expletives and sobriquets but you’re really not worth the effort.

MacLean talking about the “achievement” of Hearts getting here - they’ve completely fucked the only qualifier they’ve played??

“I don’t know what goes through someones head” A coin James. It was obvious.

Whiskey? FFS!

Are we going to get this pish on this thread every game now? Christ, email the club if you're that upset, otherwise f**k off. We're just fans like yourselves. Also, £24? Welcome to the big leagues, you've seen nothing yet in terms of cost.

A club retweeting the announcement of another clubs signing

So you don’t believe that football would be in a better place without the sectarian bile that flows out of Ibrox and Parkhead, polluting the rest of the country? I won’t take my grandkids to any game involving them for the above reason. I’m sure I’m not alone

You joined this forum two weeks ago. You said you'd spent time reading it and thought it was filled with nothing but abuse. Since joining you've posted nothing of any value, been told this, and continued to complain about the amount of abuse you get. Why are you still here? You're not posting anything worthwhile and you're still complaining about the abuse. What do you get out of it?

10 for Thursday with a lucky guess on the actor.

At the risk of causing offence, people who argue with obvious trolls are fucking idiots.

Yay me, 10 for Thursday.

Yeah, I did make a great point because I was directly quoting someone who specifically mentioned the EPL, Spain and Germany. Then I mentioned some smaller countries who have three clubs. You don’t have to agree that having three relatively matched clubs is better than two out of sight ones, but I was just replying to someone else. I wouldn’t expect you to want Scotland to have a third club on a par with you and your bosom buddies. A nice, stitched-up, cosy, two club cartel suits both of you just fine. I get it. As long as you beat ‘them’, and get it right up them. World’s a great place.

I'd like to congratulate @throbber on his new job as editor of the Daily Star.

RIP to him.

It's been a two horse race for near 40 years, mate.

Finlay Robertson is not signing. The reference to him was just a mention given to young players he’s given debuts to etc. The thing about full backs - that was in reply to what his system is providing on the park. Mentioned how Josh Edwards is allowed to bomb up the wing whilst Comrie sits back to do more defensive work. There was a deal in place late last week for a player to come on loan but it didn’t go through then. The deal is apparently still there to be had though. This was when the reference to McMullan came in as McPake said this loan signing could “give McMullan a good race”. McPake is confident the squad will be bulked up by the end of the window and said the board have backed every player he’s gone to them with, just some haven’t managed to get over the line.

It's the sullen, sad-faced lament of 'Scottish football hates us so much they'll do anything to not have us in their grounds' that makes me laugh the most. I mean, yes? Has anyone in Scottish football ever denied this is anything but the case? I thought that 'no-one likes us, we don't care' was born from this sentiment. It's as if they truly believe they are an absolute joy to have around and bring colour and vibrancy to our grounds - they can't understand why any supporter with half a functioning brain has no issue (rivalries aside) with Hibs, Hearts, Aberdeen, Motherwell etc. fans being in the ground in large number on matchday, in fact actively welcome it (I'm looking forward to seeing the away end sold out with Hibs fans on Saturday) but want Rangers and Celtic as far away and few in numbers as possible.