Paco

To be honest that’s complete rubbish from Murray. We’ve won 7 out of 11 league games against the teams below us, and 4 from 19 against the teams above us.

The list would go on forever but I’m verging towards Braverman saying Labour councillors are to blame for Pakistani men raping young girls as possibly the worst thing the Tories have said in their 13 years. It’s horrific on so many different levels. It shakes confidence in the judicial system that is - mercifully - completely apolitical in the UK. It’s an obvious lie that Labour or any councillor/MP had pretty much anything to do with it And while there have been some problems with Asian men grooming children, particularly in a few high-profile instances in Yorkshire, the Home Office’s own numbers suggest white men are more likely to be involved than any other ethnicity. I also find it quite a coincidence that Braverman of Indian Hindu heritage has specifically mentioned Pakistan. Braverman and Sunak were also Cabinet ministers for a PM who said investigating such affairs was ‘spaffing money up the wall’. Suddenly they’re righting the wrongs of Labour, who have had no real power to deal with this in 13 years, while the current leader of the Labour Party suggested practical changes over a decade ago that the Tories are now slapping on their election leaflets as they try to make political capital out of raped children. The Farage tail wagged the Tory dog for years and finally won with Brexit. With this Home Secretary we now appear - quite genuinely - to be going down the Tommy Robinson route. And it’s fucking disgusting.

Aye I’m sure Owen Coyle, the guy from AZ Alkmaar and Leanne Dempster signed on for a third-tier club salary, right enough…

I mean, you don’t have to by any stretch of the imagination. If only QP had a purpose-built, recently completed stadium for such occasions! If it were upto me QP would be playing every game at Lesser next season. They built it, they can deal with it. But I’m clearly much harsher with stadium rules than the authorities seem to be. I think it’s absolutely ludicrous for example that the Hamilton game in December was shifted to Hampden for no good reason. But that’s just me The consensus is probably fair. All or no games at Hampden in the event of promotion. I don’t like that if you got relegated you’d happily switch back to Lesser though (and presumably back again if you went up again). It’s a more extreme version of clubs wanting to play Rangers at their nearest Premiership stadium, but happily playing Alloa on their home tattie field depending on how the cup draw works out.

I’ll only ever have seen Gunn play fleetingly on Match of the Day I suspect, but Clark and Kelly are essentially only in the squad by virtue of being Scottish goalkeepers and playing regular football, not because of their ability. Kelly especially is rubbish, Clark maybe scraping average The same has been true for years. Who are they beating into the squad? Ross Laidlaw? Craig MacGilvaray at Burton Albion? Ross Doohan at Forest Green? That’s genuinely about it, and I dare say if Doohan was playing for Motherwell and Kelly at Forest Green their positions would likely be reversed. I’d be stunned if Gunn doesn’t play.

VAR itself is possibly to blame for what, three wrong decisions since it came in? All offsides, all at the same end at Fir Park. The Celtic one a few months ago is genuinely impossible to tell, but the two on Saturday looked offside to the naked eye. Maybe they weren’t, but it would be nice to have an indicator from the SFA about how confident they are - Brentford scored an offside goal against Arsenal a few weeks ago and the FA apologised with an explanation of why they got it wrong. Radio silence here. The rest of the fiasco is hopeless referees looking at replays. I’m not really sure how anyone with even a passing knowledge of football could watch the handball in the Killie-St Johnstone game and get it wrong. All the technology in the world won’t help when incompetent referees watch the replays. It’s certainly more simple to say ‘scrap VAR’ but the officials would still have had a fucking howler this weekend. The Motherwell-Rangers goals and red card were all on-field decisions, the officials missed the St Johnstone handball, Willie Collum gave Livingston a free kick when their keeper Schumacer’d Brophy, Craig Napier gave St Mirren a dreadful penalty decision, the ref at Celtic Park missed the obvious penalty to Hibs, awarded the extremely soft Celtic one and gave them one of the worst penalty decisions I’ve ever seen later on which was thankfully overturned by VAR. I don’t like VAR at all, but there’s no doubt we aren’t helping ourselves. Most of the decisions this weekend weren’t even subjective.

They’re also completely pathetic, in fairness. Queen’s Park are quite obviously going to end up with similar though. Temporary stands thrown up in a rush that’ll still be there in a decade. A completely blank canvas, Premiership football and it’ll be something barely better than Cove,

Think that was the first home league game I’ve missed this season, so a good one to choose.. Very charitable of Cove to play a hologram in goals.

Is Mark McNulty the low point of the national team? Obviously been plenty of diddies the years, and there are probably worse players who’ve been capped… but he was a journeyman in the English lower leagues who was in a tiny purple patch (four in four or something equally mundane) in the Scottish Premiership, so in he went. If he’d scored the same goals for whatever diddy English team had loaned him to Hibs nobody would’ve batted an eyelid.

I enjoy Off the Ball in the main, but Tam has been having an ongoing meltdown for years now. He’s absolutely desperate to get himself “cancelled”. In fairness to him the mention in parliament was completely mental. Really don’t know what Bardell was thinking of, using actual parliamentary time to bring up a small-time BBC radio presenter posting a ‘yer da’ clip of women hurting themselves by accident, on Instagram to his 27,000 followers. It ironically smacks of an agenda, just like Tam’s unprovoked and ludicrous attack on Marvin Bartley… Bardell I’m sure by no coincidence appears to be a Livingston fan, and has met Bartley on several occasions.

To be honest I suspect this will end up being just about enough and the rest of the argument is needless. I’m pretty surprised by the numbers we’re taking. Hamilton are entitled to half the ground, it’s a cup final. The SPFL should probably have told both clubs to either sell one stand at a time, or to sell the Main Stand from the end sections in. But we weren’t exactly looking at an Old Firm at Hampden scenario where we’d snap up thousands of unused tickets. Lessons learned, you’d hope, and presumably any Rovers fans locked out will be be in the double figures at an absolute maximum.

Nothing to get too excited about there. Angus Gunn obviously the big news. I wondered if we’d maybe try Hayden Hackney in the squad but always seemed unlikely when he was named in the u21’s. Elliot Anderson presumably not interested at this stage either. A few players (Cooper, Hendry, Tierney, Patterson, Gilmour, Dykes) who haven’t played much football recently for one reason or another. But I don’t see anybody battering the door down.

There will be a chunk of tickets held back for sponsors and players families etc. Hospitality also comes into play. I also suspect but could be wrong that the ‘top tier’ of Falkirk’s main stand is unsold. Would be good for the club to state if they’re trying to do anything about it though. Always happy for both clubs to get an equal allocation for a cup final but maybe, with a bit of hindsight, both clubs should’ve been told to sell one stand at a time. At the moment it looks like 2000 empty seats in one end, and Rovers fans locked out at the other. Seems silly.

Certainly don’t want to be the singing police but I find the constant chants about Kilmarnock pretty weird from the Ayr end. Falkirk are dreadful. Donaldson is an absolute dumpling. They’re going to win.

Yeah, this seems a bit silly doesn’t it? We’re sold out, and assuming Hamilton got the same allocation there’s still around 1400 seats going unsold - I assume a combination of SPFL tickets, family tickets and what Falkirk laughably call their ‘top tier’. Surely something can be done? Doubt we’ll sell much more than a few hundred more but seems ludicrous to lock people out when as it stands there will be nearly 4000 empty seats on the day.

Events can change everything. I’m not suggesting any of Scottish Labour’s leaders have been a reincarnated Donald Dewar, but who’d have thought a privately educated millionaire like Sarwar with a bit of a speech impediment would be the man to lead a Scottish Labour revival? Keir Starmer is at best a beige candidate who won’t do very much and is currently polling better numbers than Blair’s landslide in 1997. The next First Minister might just land with a hung parliament, or more likely they’re so inept that granting a referendum becomes a tempting option for the UK Government. Either would be closer than under Sturgeon’s leadership because despite what plenty seem to think, there is essentially nothing a Scottish First Minister can actually do to achieve independence. Sturgeon has tried all the legal routes and failed.

I’m not sure why some on the left/on Twitter seem to feel that ‘stopping the small boats’ shouldn’t absolutely be a priority, for any government of any ideology. 50,000 people a year paying criminals for transport, risking their lives to come here, some dying on the way, either living in dreadful conditions when they do arrive or simply disappearing into the cities, unable to work or live freely and waiting over two years to even have their applications considered? It’s a horrible situation for everyone. Obviously the method of stopping is the key to whether or not it’s a fucking dreadful/racist policy. But in general, Labour are quite right to kick the Tories over it.

I’m convinced it doesn’t matter who we play up front when the supporting players remain the same. They’re all small, cut inside, slow the game down, look for angled pass types rather than hit the byline and thump it across the six yard line, or play an early through ball past the offside trap. It’s not like our strikers miss chance after chance, they’re rarely in the box because they have to play one twos with Connolly/Ross/Stanton/Vaughan/Easton. We need to get out of the 4-2-3-1 rut for me, and if it means a remodelling of the squad and losing some that we’d consider our better players, then so be it.

They are all genuinely terrible. Forbes is also a very poor speaker, I expected her to torch her campaign floundering albeit maybe not quite as spectacularly as she did. It’s surely too big a lead for the SNP to *lose* the next Holyrood election, and events can always change things entirely. But with the stale government of the past few years, losing Sturgeon’s personal vote and whatever shenanigans will follow whoever wins this contest around, it isn’t looking great for the SNP right now.

I don’t think the committee could realistically have used stronger language. He’s bang to rights, and is already using Sue Gray as a getout. Going full Trump by the look of it.

I think it’s a monumental own goal from Labour to be honest. Gives ammo to Tories and it’ll be twisted every which way possible. Obviously it doesn’t change the facts - Partygate was a thing because Boris Johnson and 10 Downing St had dozens of illegal gatherings. But when you look at the state of today’s Tory media front pages it’ll be hard to keep that narrative.

Four home games in a row to come, with three of them against the bottom half - Morton, Cove, ICT, Arbroath. Ten points from that and the league is in the bag?

I got to thinking there must be some pretty senior UK politicians who actually did vote against gay marriage, rather than just saying they would’ve done ala Forbes. In Scotland the SNP had seven votes against. Alasdair Allan was a junior minister at the time and was appointed Minister for International Development in 2016. Roseanna Cunningham was given two separate Cabinet Secretary roles afterwards, and Fergus Ewing was appointed as a Cab Sec in 2016. Labour had three nobodies who are now gone vote against and the Tories had eight - Murdo Fraser the only notable name. At Westminster there’s no notable names who voted against from Labour or the Lib Dems but from a quick scan these are people who went on to serve in Cabinet, some in very senior roles - Robert Buckland, Alun Cairns, Therese Coffey, Geoffrey Cox, Stephen Crabb, David Davies, David Davis, Nadine Dorries, Charlie Elphicke, Michael Fallon, Liam Fox, Simon Hart, Kwasi Kwarteng, Esther McVey, Nicky Morgan, Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Ben Wallace, John Whittingdale and Gavin Williamson. I’ve probably missed a few who were briefly ministers in Johnson’s banter week, but a real rogue’s gallery there, with a Home Secretary and a Chancellor involved. I don’t recall any major criticism of putting someone against gay marriage in charge of the police force, or in charge of the law as in the case of Geoffrey Cox but it must’ve existed I guess perhaps crucially none of these people have every actively become party leaders, but some have certainly stood - most recently Zahawi abstained (ala Humza?) and stood last year. Esther McVey stood in 2019 for leader, and Stephen Crabb and Liam Fox stood in 2016. I don’t remember it being mentioned in those cases, but perhaps it was? Does any of this matter? Probably not. But it is interesting that such a position hasn’t really halted any careers in the UK over the past decade.

The only legal route to independence is hoping the Westminster government of the day agree to a referendum, and winning it. Any candidate telling you anything else is lying. Is Ash fucking Regan willing to go to jail ala the Catalonians by declaring independence on a combined 50.1% vote for the SNP, Greens and Alba? Of course she isn’t. Sturgeon knows this full well and it’s a disappointment to me she just won’t say it.

I’m not sure why we’re still having the ‘so you can’t be religious and be a politician’ debate when Humza Yousaf is literally also a candidate. You’d presume on religious grounds he essentially agrees with Kate Forbes for his personal life but has consistently backed gay marriage, abortion and trans rights in parliament. All Forbes had to say is she wouldn’t practice these things herself but appreciates the country at large doesn’t work like that. And when directly asked whether she’d vote for gay marriage… yeah, maybe she should’ve lied?