Dunning1874

Reminder that Gregor Townsend was given a new contract before the World Cup.

From that article: “Contrary to multiple statements made… the land is not owned by Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club. “According to the Land Register of Scotland, the sole proprietor of the land is Fairways Inverness Limited. “The many layers of implied ownership, overlapping directorships and interested parties seems intentionally opaque." Was this addressed at the open meeting at all? Or the point that the planning application claims the community trust will be the beneficiary when all the public statements are about the football club's budget?

If we don't find a way to score goals without Oakley we won't make it, considering that Imrie has said a return by the end of March is the best case scenario. Pretty staggering statistics with and without him. Oakley in the starting XI: P17 W10 D3 L4 F29 A14 Oakley not in the starting XI: P10 W0 D4 L6 F5 A17 Title challenging form with him, definite relegation form without him.

A bit of a pushback against the new McCarthyism in the UK, with those who've tried to hound anyone expressing Palestinian solidarity (or in some cases Muslims simply existing) out of public life seeing it backfire. Remember the risible claims that plush octopus toys were actually an antisemitic symbol invoking Nazi propaganda about Jewish control of the planet, because Greta Thunberg had one in the background of a photo and she was consistently using her platform to draw attention to Palestine so some absurd smear to discredit her had to be constructed? There was some horrendous abuse directed at a Muslim taking part in an episode of University Challenge which aired in November, as their team had one of those toys on display as a mascot. Curious that the three white contestants got no criticism, but the woman wearing a hijab did. Another reason she was criticised was that she was wearing black, red and green, the colours of the Palestinian flag, clearly this meant she was expressing her support for Hamas and the October 7th attack? Even ignoring the obvious flaws in the ridiculous logical fallacy that wearing anything with the colours of the Palestinian flag makes someone a Hamas supporter, she wasn't. It's an orange and pink jacket with a green pocket, she's not responsible for the BBC's lighting. Also, this episode was filmed in March. Tory member of the House of Lords, Baroness Foster, was one of those most loudly decrying her, explicitly calling her an antisemite. Gorgianeh complained to the HOL standards committee about Foster's conduct but the complaint was dismissed. She has today had to pay damages and put out a grovelling public apology for that defamatory lie, although is still somehow managing to claim the octopus is antisemitic symbol which is obviously fucking nonsense. Michelle Donelan has also been forced to pay damages and apologise, although having made the remarks in her capacity as a member of the government has disgracefully paid the damages out of taxpayer's money rather than her own pocket, while the supposed apology has a noticeable lack of apologising in it. A professor and doctor appointed to an advisory group to UK Research and Innovation, a body funded by the Department of Science, Innovation & Technology which Donelan leads, were accused by her in letter she made public of sharing extremist material and in one of their cases explicitly supporting Hamas. This was obviously a lie - the evidence of her supposed support for Hamas was tweeting a Guardian article with the comment "this is disturbing". The other had described Israel's actions as genocide and apartheid. It's clear that they're not going to stop the authoritarian crackdown on dissent and will continue to accuse anyone who dares to disagree with the their continued active participation in war crimes as an extremist, but it's good to see some sort of consequence with people standing up to them.

Aye, while they didn't race into an early lead or add a second so less impressive overall, Dundee United basically did the same thing Inverness did on Saturday. They got the lead then knew they could deal with whatever we would throw at them between aerial dominance when we hoofed it and crowding out the middle of the park when we passed it. They didn't threaten again, but they knew they didn't need to. It's looking alarmingly like games are going to be done as soon as we go behind while both Oakley and Wilson are out. Mad that a team can suddenly look so devoid of creativity off the back of such a long unbeaten run, but lose your biggest attacking threat and the powerhouse of your midfield at the same time and here we are.

The regression without Oakley is startling. Teams know if they shut off space for Power to pass it and force us to go long we'll win absolutely nothing with Muirhead or Quitongo up there, we badly need a proper alternative.

That was possibly the worst I've ever seen Quitongo play, Muirhead is looking like Hopkin era Muirhead, O'Connor is giving it away with every second touch and Tyler French continues to be Tyler French. This is not good.

The British media and political class, the journalist in this case obviously being a fine example of the incestuousness and nepotism between the two, truly is rancid. It's all a game to these people, it doesn't matter if those who aren't in the big club are slaughtered and starved, as long as the people who matter get to pat each other on the back while gossiping about how sensible and intelligent they all are.

Both teams given a nonsense penalty, both teams correctly get a goal disallowed, red card is a stonewaller. You can't stud someone in the face at head height regardless of it being a genuine attempt to play the ball.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza A long but vital read here about Israel's national psyche, the role of the Holocaust and historic antisemitism in that, how it influences their treatment of Palestinians and how it governs Israel's relationship with other states and diaspora Jews.

A bad day and defeat was inevitably going to come after such a long run, but unfortunate that it was today considering the upcoming fixtures. The concern is if that's going to be typical of performances without Oakley and Wilson: without them we have no physical presence to speak of outwith the centre backs and every team in the division could bully us the way Inverness did today. Inverness well worth the win, managed having an early lead superbly and outwith the disallowed goal we created absolutely f**k all, because they didn't let us.

How he restarted with the drop ball is technically correct. If the game stops inside the box it's always with the defending goalkeeper regardless of who had possession. The issue there of course was stopping it in the first place when Carragher was obviously at it, as proven by leaping to his feet for a square go as soon as the whistle went, when the ball was about to drop to Crawford unmarked for a shot 8 yards out. While the ref did absolutely lose the plot there, the reason we're losing this is Inverness being much better than us and they're entirely worth the lead.

I didn't see the first goal but Inverness played it superbly from being 1-0 up there. They know we don't have the height or physicality to compete with them in the air without Oakley, shut off any space in midfield for passes on the deck and mopped up every second ball after forcing us to go long. They were in total control and it looked every bit like we were heading for a 1-0 where they let us have all the ball knowing we'd create nothing with it, then enter Jamie MacDonald. It doesn't matter how unfit he is, that's just absolutely abysmal goalkeeping. It's piss poor from O'Connor to give the freekick away in the first place, but that's an absolutely basic save. If we had an outfielder in goal I'd forgive them parrying that rather than holding it but even then it'd be unacceptable to let it in.

Sadly when we have concerns about injuries we don't have anyone who can run to the police with a funny handshake to beg them to tell the SPFL to call games off on risible safety grounds, like a certain CEO we could mention. Sir Douglas Imrie's 100th game in charge of Morton today.

Got a really bad feeling about this, injuries are inevitably going to come round but Wilson, Oakley and Mullen are possibly the worst three players in the squad to lose. We simply don't have anyone who can get close to offering what Oakley does, as Raith showed opposition defences will physically dominate us without him and if any team turns up with the same mindset of Airdrie to kick us off the park and see how much they get away with, it'll be much harder to stand up to that. The whole midfield have been excellent since December, but I don't think it's a coincidence that our turnaround came with a fully fit Wilson in midfield rather than not being fit enough to last 90 minutes or filling in at full back and both Power & Gillespie have looked much better for having Wilson beside them. Blues has been in excellent form too so have to hope moving him inside comes close to replicating Wilson's contribution, but it's gutting to hear his season might be done. Even aside from MacDonald not being fully fit himself and just not being quite as good as Mullen, you only really notice how important Mullen's distribution is when he's not there. He's got a fantastic range of passing for a goalkeeper and his ability to pinpoint passes from our own box is so important to get us up the park quickly, which is doubly important when we don’t have Oakley so we're only going to get into the final third by finding attackers' feet. We'll be doing very well to get results without any of them, and with Dundee United, Hearts then Partick away in our next three it's not a massive stretch to see our long unbeaten run suddenly being followed up by or overlapping a small winless run. A win today would be massive to avoid that.

This is probably right, it would be more surprising if he was good enough for the Championship rather than out of his depth after that career, but that doesn't mean he wouldn’t have been a better option than Boruc while Gaston is out.

While such a result should be seismic, especially with another Independent coming second, the circumstances mean all the major parties are simply going to shrug. No one is actually going to learn anything from this, except perhaps welshbairn. Galloway, while no one can deny he's been consistent on the UK's foreign policy and especially on the Middle East throughout his career, is a horrible grifting c**t who'll pick whatever position on domestic politics he thinks will appeal most to whichever local electorate he's performing for at the time. We're probably only days away from him saying something grossly offensive that alienates half of the 12000 who voted for him and ensures he loses the seat come a general election. That 12K number is also pertinent. This is the lowest turnout a Rochdale election has ever had and while the vote has obviously been fragmented between several candidates, no one has won Rochdale with fewer than 19K votes since 1924, when women still had to be over 30 and either own property or be married to a man who did to vote, and the last time Galloway's 12K would have won it was 1910, when the entire size of the electorate was less than 13K. There are a lot of stay at home voters here to be won come a GE. So Labour should be getting a wake up call about the scale of anger over their explicit support for Israel’s war crimes, but they'll cling to the above as a reason to ignore that warning. Even if by the time a general election happens there's been a further change in policy, they've finally shifted to calling for a ceasefire properly rather than the watered down shite they connived on last week and are no longer refusing to acknowledge the war crime of collective punishment, the simple argument that 'a vote for Labour is a vote for genocide' is not going to go away. This is not the kind of stain that is going to wash off Starmer with the changing of a news cycle and that could hurt them. What's more likely though is that they double down on their position, considering the reason for Ali's suspension, and cling to the belief that selecting a candidate they don't need to withdraw support for will get them over the line. There's the entirely feasible scenario that this leads to an even more authoritarian approach from their NEC and they start imposing candidates on constituencies entirely rather than just banning anyone to the left of Gordon Brown from shortlists on flimsy pretexts. While Ali was firmly aligned with the right wing Starmer and the NEC belong to, he wasn't their first choice as they were backing Paul Waugh. Expect him to be back writing for the Independent in the meantime before being the candidate in the GE.

This is really a separate issue about the offside rule itself regardless of VAR, because as you say offside or not is an objective fact and as long as you have VAR judging it you're going to have decisions where a player is just on or off by a millimetre of their toe or shoulder however you define it. You just move the problem of VAR drawing lines for a miniscule difference from the front of the attacker's body to the back of it. That fundamental issue can't be resolved as long as you're using VAR to check for offside. I still think it would be a good change to move it to whole body beyond the last defender though, not because of VAR but because it weights the rule back in the favour of the attacking player and that's a good thing that better reflects the spirit of the offside rule. It's too easy for players to be caught offside and that change would give attacking players more leeway, but that really has nothing to with VAR and the same logic applies even in leagues where VAR isn't in use.

I see there are articles going round the media - the Telegraph in this case - about international rugby's eligibility rules being ridiculous and needing overhauled. Funny how this always comes up when Scotland beat England and not when Ireland do, considering Scotland had two residency qualified players in their 23 at the weekend to Ireland's three.

I enjoy it when lnverness fans fail to see the possibility that if their board met with Dougie Imrie, the fact he didn't become their manager after that doesn't mean they didn't offer him the job.

Correct, as pointed out in the Morton thread where he started off this attention seeking before creating this thread for more performative nonsense.

It's not so much taking offence as bafflement that people are seeing things based on a preconceived notion of what they expect from a team rather than looking at what's actually happened in front of them. If there was a big weakness in the Morton team tonight it was a lack of height in Oakley's absence and having no credible option to go direct as a result, leading to us spending a lot of time knocking it about tidily in our own half but not having anyone to aim at if we wanted to mix it up and go long when Raith successfully shut off passes on the deck. If Power couldn't buy himself room to spread it around we eventually had no option but full backs dinking it down the line in the hope it would hit wingers feet or we could play off throw-ins when those balls were intercepted. Whenever we went route one it was effortlessly dealt with by the Raith defence all night, because we have precisely one attacking player in the whole squad who ticks the boxes of "big and physical" like Raith have with Hamilton and Rudden, and with Oakley out there was simply no target man to aim at. Robbie Muirhead is tall but about as far removed from being a physical target man as any attacker you'll find and will rarely win a header with his back to goal. Whip crosses into the box for him to attack and he can be dangerous with his head, but outside the box you need to get the ball to his feet or you can forget it. Quitongo is well built and will happily get into a physical tussle with defenders, but he's also small and is probably in single figures for headers won in his whole career. Crawford and Blues have no aerial presence whatsoever. The aerial presence we had tonight began and ended with the centre backs, which fair enough made us a big threat at set-pieces and both Baird and O'Connor were more than happy to mix it up in the air defensively, with O'Connor also getting himself a stupid booking having a needless dig, but Raith had more height in their team than Morton did tonight. While no Morton fan disputes our physicality it's as if fans of other clubs don't know what that means, they hear "physical" and "horrible to play against" so assume "team of 6'5 mountains whose whole gameplan is Brian Graham levels of flailing elbows". Strapp is more than happy to fly into tackles and get in physical contests with players far bigger than he is, Power is a total shithouse who has spent his whole career being willing to leave one on on opponents (although from the away end it looked like that Vaughan incident tonight had no contact whatsoever), didn't play tonight obviously but Broadfoot is an even bigger shithouse, the high energy pressing game with players never stopping the running with Crawford, Blues and others tearing after the opposition defence snapping around their ankles to nick the ball both unsettles teams and leads to lots of niggly fouls, causing stop start games. They'll play for set-pieces, slow the game down and get in your face. Those things make us horrible to play against and make physical an entirely fair description, but I've seen a Morton team crammed with giants whose gameplan was entirely to get the ball in the air and prevail at head tennis because their height meant it would work more often than not - this team is a million miles away from that, because there simply aren't enough tall players in the squad to do it. Physical and big are not the same thing.

Don't think either side can complain with a point there, Raith had a few spells where momentum swung their way and found a lot of space during them but ultimately didn't create a clear cut chance with that, while we did create some but they were mostly of the scrappy variety rather than incisive attacking play and we ultimately weren't clinical with them anyway - Quitongo clean through twice and made an arse of it to the point of not getting a shot away twice, Baird just missing the target from a long throw, O'Connor unlucky not to deflect Strapp's shot in. Has to go down as a good point, especially with no Oakley, no Mullen, losing Wilson and Muirhead clearly unfit.

Muirhead clearly isn't fully fit so I can see the logic in having Quitongo up front instead of him, but don't think it's working.

Raith have taken control of this. When they're passing it so nicely around our box you could really have done without O'Connor getting a daft booking. Wilson off as well now, Power and Gillespie together is going to be a hell of challenge.