vikingTON

The obsession with 'holding the keys to Bute House' is part of the problem. There's no point being in government when you have pretty much no drive left to deliver serious reforms and the ministerial talent pool resembles three tadpoles in a shrivelling puddle. All parties of government require renewal on the sidelines eventually. Fruit loop Greens letting Scottish Labour in to run a minority administration - while ending Yousaf's leadership - would be the best possible way for the SNP to reinvigorate itself and draw a line under the past few years.

I have no time for West Ham as a club and their nauseating fan base, but this is the wrong take. They want rid of Moyes because their club has collected a large number of quality attackers over the past two seasons, but his tactics inevitably revert to 'shitfest from set pieces and hoof it to the big man, wee man partnership' of Antonio/Bowen. When you do have players like Kudus, Paqueta capable of picking teams apart and others not getting a look in (Cornet was signed for fairly big money and has made 20 appearances in 3 seasons), then it's fair to conclude that Moyes is not getting the best out of their particular squad.

Why would they have to do this to address your weirdo conspiracy theory? Did you attend that play-off? What part of that contest supports your theory?

Abbey Vale are 4th this season with no chance of promotion. A completely competent team at their existing level - not one that has reached a 'bottleneck' from progressing at all. They've haven't lost out on shipping 200 goals in a single Lowland League season, just because a handful of pyramid anoraks insist that All Champions Must Be Promoted.

As opposed to filling it with games against rancid B team outfits which you were all over instead.

The reward for winning a league title is the trophy and status of champions. They are not being denied that by having to demonstrate their worth to move from a local tier to a regional tier of competition, and in turn from a regional to a national tier. It's bizarre that Scottish football has developed this fixation about 'ventilation' and harrumphing about play-offs, when the end result is that the best equipped teams play at their appropriate level and those that aren't equipped do not get caught miles out of their depth by a promotion that isn't appropriate. The only issue I'd raise is that licensing should have been made compulsory and the terms tightened much, much sooner - to stop the likes of Cove and Edinburgh City pushing well above the tier that their overall club structure reflected. That would have rewarded more sustainable development by clubs from the traditional non-league, even if the replacement rate is smaller.

The system is therefore not a bottleneck for the reasons already set out. Which EoS or SoS team are ever likely to be banging their heads endlessly against a glass ceiling from this stage onwards? I'm not seeing any at all - particularly with more clubs likely to enter both leagues from above in the near future. And once the West region finally catches up in terms of licensing, the handful of clubs similar to Bonnyrigg, Linlithgow etc. will progress upwards at a pace determined by merit. The idea that there will be three crack outfits battering down the door to the LL each season if only for the cruel and unfair play-off is a fantasy.

No it isn't, because literally none of the clubs taking part have been denied promotion on a regular basis. What sort of bottleneck allows Bonnyrigg, Bo'ness, Tranent and Linlithgow all to sail through to a higher level without a problem? Have St Cuthbert's Wanderers been cruelly denied their right to err, stinking the place out and conceding 200 goals in one season at a higher level?

None of these points are relevant to your claim that there's a bottleneck in the current system preventing clubs from progressing on merit through the (LL path) pyramid. There categorically isn't a bottleneck affecting EoS teams from progressing. There categorically isn't one affecting the SoS either. So rather than being a 'pyramid' problem, it is in fact a minor issue for one particular, recently-formed league. And one that wouldn't actually be solved by your clamouring for automatic promotion for all league champions anyway.

What eligible and qualifying clubs - under the existing rules - are being held back? There's no demonstrable 'bottleneck' in the EoS. Every obvious candidate to move up has easily done so already; with plenty of less obvious candidates now with a chance of doing so as well in the near future. There's no demonstrable 'bottleneck' in the SoS. Dalbeattie were flushed out of the LL on merit and have been down for one season only. And with the best will in the world to these clubs, previous candidates like St Cuthbert's/Creetown are not exactly being cruelly denied their obvious place competing at a much higher level. Which leaves us with the West of Scotland. A league that has failed to produced a licensed winner to compete in most years; and when it did, its entrant fared as well as English clubs did in the Champions' League this season (hubris -> bottle-job -> dismal exit). It's really not an issue for the pyramid structure as a whole then: it's a WoS issue only. That might well change in the future but at the moment there is no such bottleneck.

Hopefully someone can provide a word by word transcription service and post it on here.

This degree of utter delusion (see also our centre back partnership above) is why we can't actually have nice things. Even when all available evidence from recent weeks points to the need for an utterly ruthless purge of deadwood, you never disappoint in puffing up gubbins squad filler.

O'Connor and Baird are quite clearly not 'one of the best partnerships in the league', which is why the former has spent the entire season struggling to win his spot over Kirk Broadfoot (87). With only the possible exception of Airdrie, none of the top half teams right now would be falling over themselves to break up such a momentous 'partnership'. I'd offer O'Connor a new deal but only if we can sign serious competition for centre back, with Darragh going into next season as our centre/right back cover option. He needs to earn a starting spot instead of dining out on a decent first season - reminiscent of Baird in his first spell at the club who was also overrated by the fanbase when his overall performance level was too inconsistent to make a genuinely effective defender.

The onus is on those claiming that a break clause is widespread in lower league Scottish manager contracts to back it up with evidence. The barrage of entirely logical arguments against discredit that claim until evidence is produced. That's how fact-based analysis works: I can understand why you might be having difficulties with that.

Do I really have to point out the utter desperation of the 'logic' behind that claim? I don't think you believe that for one second though. You're speculating without any actual evidence to date of these release clauses being present and being used to empty similar managers though. You can highlight McIntyre's fallen stock but the same argument applies far more to the team he agreed to take over. It's not in any way a defence of McIntyre's performance or his overall ability in management* to say that the job he took on was always likely to result in relegation at the end of this season. So why would he agree to take over a team that wasn't his own halfway through and also agree a break clause on that basis? It's obvious horseshit. * The dictionary definition of mediocrity

Will Keith/Brechin be writing another fuuuuuming joint statement about the disgraceful, jobsworth referee not giving them an extra hour and a half to shovel sand onto a flooded park to somehow create a real surface for a professional football match?

Well no, I very much doubt that Jim McIntyre has voluntarily - and automatically - left money on the table after his parade of dismissals by other clubs.

The lack of self-awareness in this bubble-burst homily right now is breathtaking.

Why on earth would an employee accept a legal maximum compensation payment that only benefits their boss - who can keep them tied to the club for the full length of the contract with no such reciprocal clause? Back in the land of reality, when it's obviously TTG the club board/chief executive/chairman/Walter Mitty sits in a room with the manager or their agent and works out a suitable deal for both parties. The employers don't have a magical break clause unless they've hired a desperate moron as their manager in the first place.

Really not sure how you can seriously pin 95% of the blame on an obvious Dutch fraud and his lack of defensive nous, when the previous match at Hampden saw Davidson's team reduce a rampant Morton team at that time to a handful of good chances in the game and escape with a 0-0 draw that was not unfair. That was two months ago: so how exactly is the Dutch guy still responsible for you getting bodied and for your keeper chucking in pub league clangers again in April? It seems an exercise in wishful thinking when the 'soft as shite' marker and dreadful results - against Imrie at least - has been a consistent pattern for all of your managers at this level.

1) "His peers" are Scottish Championship football players/Herbalife reps. A constituency whose members are, generally speaking, thicker than a whale omelette and in which Simon 'Si' Ferry is held up as a great thinking man of the game. So their judgment can be safely filed in the bin where it belongs. 2) Lauded by Queens' Park fans - well, see above points too really. The evidence is plain for anyone else to see: he's a total haddy. Thanks for playing anyway.

The penalty save was justice as it looked like an extremely soft 'foul' and mebbe outside the box too. Completely predictable that Muirhead would miss given the game he was having too. We can't complain about the result at all, as Dunfermline produced a decent move from their perspective - ridiculous switching off from ours - to go ahead. We are persistently chronic if we have to chase a game and today was no exception. A couple of stramashes somehow not going in sums up our run at the moment, but Mullen's save stopped Dunfermline getting a second goal too. Neither team created much at all from open play - we needed to do better to rescue a point. The annoying thing is that we weren't actually miles off it today, The team was just filled with 6/10 performances all round. Other than perhaps Muirhead, nobody was really poor but we can't have just okay performances across the team and expect to win. The quality isn't there to bail us out. The team looks low on confidence but if we get ourselves ahead in a game for a change I think we'll be fine and could well go back on a strong run of results. Quite a few players should be playing for a contract though because the fringe players have not been delivering when called upon and are not changing games when they come off the bench either.

Looking similar this afternoon too.

Is the same way that people kept claiming this before the Hearts game too?

Yes, you're definitely missing something.