Thumper

Same people. Total list of places I've been in the last month, in three countries, that are cash-only: 1. The bogs at Buchanan Street bus station (both the airport bus and the X77 take contactless) 2. The Bell Rock (where the average age of the clientele is pushing 75) 3. The Beijing Palace If you aren't a) a pensioner, b) a time-traveller from the 70s or c) a dealer then the chances that you're more comfortable with cash than a card or app two months from the end of the 2010s are slim. This goes doubly for away fans travelling from the fucking West End.

Fair play to McCall for finally giving an AU Media interview where looking like he was desperate to be anywhere else, while being keen to keep himself at arm's length from Ayr United themselves, was finally appropriate.

Owen Coyle was in A Shot At Glory (alongside McCall) and is therefore, along with everyone else who was in A Shot At Glory with the exception of Ally McCoist, acceptable. Would also take: Didier Agathe, Robert Duvall, Brian Cox, Kirsty Mitchell, Michael Keaton.

John Robertson lives in fucking Inverness and doesn't want to move away from fucking Inverness. He's only said this about forty thousand times on the radio in the last fifteen years. Inverness is quite far from Somerset Park. I think it's fair to say that unless there is a significant reorganisation of the continental shelf that remarkably leaves Ayr and Inverness a couple of hundred miles closer together without destroying them in the process, John Robertson is unlikely to become the manager of Ayr United Football Club.

Anyone who would put money on something like that is a degenerate gambler and should either seek help or have it enforced upon them.

if he's good enough for a step up, then he can step up, instead of crab-walking to Maryhill.

Worth noting that for all the outreach and fan stuff that happened in the Reid era (Boab, the heyday of the Ragazzi, pubs doing Ayr beers etc) the only thing that you could actually graph attendances against is performance. McCall had a barely-concealed contempt for basically all of that stuff and it didn't matter at all. This isn't really how I'd like for things to be, but the figures speak for themselves. If that Friday game last season hadn't been called off because of such a petty thing as Somerset being hit by a Category 5 storm at the time, Ayr would have gotten a league win against ICT, and possibly avoided the perennial post-Halloween collapse. Anyway, into this shite. 2-1 home win, Moffat / McCowan / some c**t completely unmarked at the back post as always.

Had this happened then this weekend the news would be that player-manager Michael Moffat was considering his position after a heavy loss away to Stranraer left Ayr sixth in League One. Curious as to whether this includes Keigan Parker's bicycle kick equaliser against the same club a couple of seasons later, which God himself has decreed is the best goal ever scored at Somerset Park.

The board gave McCall more than they've given other managers for the last decade and a half. This is not the same as backing him to the extent that other clubs in this division get backed ffs. If there is another full-time team in the country with a lower playing budget I'd like to know who it is. Yes, this is fiscally prudent. Yes, everyone hates Dunfermline and Livingston and Gretna and Dundee United and Morton and Partick and every other club that absolutely spunks money gambling on promotion and then subsequently explodes in financial ruin, but the fact is that nearly every other club around this level has had a go at this since Ayr last tried it nearly 20 years ago and McCall can plainly see it's paid off for some. Also Alan Forrest is a local boy who came through the club ranks and his big brother plays in the fucking Champions League every season. He's not going to go to fucking Partick Thistle, scurrilous dressing room rumours or not.

Ah yes, Craig Moore, who served as Punch Bag Alpha when he came into the team last season.

Mark Roberts's first game in charge was a 4-0 shellacking of the team who had finished third in the SPL the previous season, who played their first team. Just saying. McCall was never remotely coy about his time at Ayr. He owed Cameron a favour for taking a chance on him, but the writing was on the wall when he saw that the absolute upper limit for a home attendance was going to be 3000 regardless of performance and he'd have to offer a blood sacrifice to get more than a one-year deal offered to a player. I don't think it was written in the stars that he'd have left this season, but Caldwell's dismissal from one of his fondest old clubs with a Euromillions winner in the wings to provide funding was exactly the sort of thing that his gentleman's agreement with Cameron was intended to accommodate. As for the manager nom, I'd give it to Sandy. The magnificent novelty of having two managers in a row whose management experience didn't consist entirely of activities put together by Eidos Entertainment or Rangers TV is spine-tingling. It's also refreshing that in the post-match interview he didn't sound like he was trying to pass a kidney stone every time he was asked if his own team were any good.

It's now September. The manager who turned things around is away, the general expectation is that the replacement will be whoever is cheapest, and the budget has been cut. What is this if not a lack of ambition? My own controversial opinion: Brian Reid shouldn't have been sacked. And Anthony Marenghi was a massive missed opportunity, not dissimilar to what might have happened to Shankland if not for McCall.

I had no problem whatsoever with the tactics at Hampden until the game was lost, at which point it was too late. The idea that a team which featured Chris Smith would go into a semifinal on dire form and start playing total football is very silly. Everyone I was with that day was absolutely fucking beeling tbf.

About a thousand times fewer than players who are ruled out of the professional game by whatever bunnet is in charge of scouting them because they're not six foot three by the time they're 17. Fuckin' football fans, man. If people had their way then the team would be training by running up and down sand dunes on Greenan shore, chasing that up with three of four tins of Tartan Special before the drive home, and fans would be paying at the game with shillings.

twelve quid is dece. Still expecting a fucking doing.