the_bully_wee

Big win for the plucky amateurs today, fair play!

You mean you left before extra time and pens?!

I don't care if Tuesday's blue, Wednesday's grey and Thursday too, Friday, I don't care 'bout you, It's Monday, I'm in love.

How come we can make outrageously exciting signings at the end of March when the season's basically done and dusted, yet see fit to sign the likes of Billy Mortimer in the summer? What a club.

Kevin Nicoll extension

I fondly remember playing fives with Joe Jordan back in the late sixties. Of course, in those days there was none of your AstroTurf nonsense, we all played on concrete or red ash and it was a true man's game. I spent a few days out cold in the hospital after JJ powered a shot off my puss - great times. The game died alongside leather balls, I tell you!

If they'd any sense they'd launch him post-haste and give the gig to one of the senior players until the end of the season, if nobody else fancied it. Relegation is by no means a foregone conclusion with East Fife (on today's evidence) also a gang and a pretty average cluster of L2 clubs vying for the play-offs (albeit Annan are hitting form at the right time). The prospect of any kind of an uptick in morale and the adoption of an approach which doesn't involve shoehorning as many centre-backs into the starting XI as possible is surely worth rolling the dice at this stage. Obviously you guys will know better than I, but from the outside looking in I think a lot were (justifiably) won over by his previous connection with the club, the manner in which he spoke and carried himself and also the speed with which he assembled a squad, all of which are a recipe for optimism. It's incredible how far south things have gone after a frighteningly good first quarter, one which had me pre-heating the oven to gas mark egg-on-my-face after asserting that Dumbarton would be juking it out near the bottom despite absolutely demolishing us on the opening day.

Bit weird that Farrell's not been given the bullet yet, particularly due to the desperate rhetoric he's been dealing in for about a month now. If your team is making so many errors leading to goals, then the last thing you should be doing is publicly bodying them, risking complete disillusion and putting the fear of god in them when it comes to making further blunders. It did come across as a bit of a strange hire last summer given his average-at-best spell with Stranraer, so I can't say I'm too surprised it's wound up like this. For all Peterhead's struggles, they seem to pull the odd result out the bag. On the other hand, it's hard to see where Dumbarton's next points are coming from, especially when a pretty rancid East Fife kept them at arm's length last week.

Shame on you, Stenhousemuir FC!

Wouldn't exactly say we're playing particularly well, but Clyde are definitely the team more in control of the game and richly deserved a goal from that wee five minute spell they had. It looked from the stream as though McAllister's effort was some way over the line, based on its trajectory off the bar, so I'd be keen to see that one again. Splaine's been the best player on the park and, if we were the sort of club which showed any foresight, we'd already be doing our utmost to tie him down for next season and beyond.

That was surely at least a foot over the line.

Before the recent upturn in form, the Queenies faithful turned into a baying mob at prior portrayals of their playing squad as human beings. Brave of their social media team to keep at it!

As pathetic as it is predictable, unfortunately. We should pick up enough points from here to stay clear of danger but this has been a woeful season on the whole.

... but apart from that, Dumbarton are in good shape!

Went 20-0 in champs this weekend and am resultantly now considering complete retirement from all future FIFA activities. Having TOTY Dias and Flashback Varane at CB is borderline cheating, regardless of how average most of the others surrounding them are.

Couldn't agree any more with the above. As the club's foremost (and really only) supporter's organisation, the Glasgow Branch should be looking to be as inclusive and welcoming as possible, with a stated aim of uniting and galvanising rather than perpetuating division in what is a declining and ageing fanbase. Taking accusations of rape apologism and the rest out of the debate, they've obviously misread the room with the Goodwillie situation in terms of how it would affect the club. That, of course, doesn't completely wipe out the good that is done by them, but the response of many individuals involved in the past few days has flown in the face of what the Glasgow Branch should be. If its aim is to carry on as a closed circle of self-preservation which questions the credentials of every non-member as a "true Clyde fan", then it's never going to achieve everything it could and its membership will remain exactly as it is. The only way to become united as a fanbase is to accept that there will be disagreements on some issues, mistakes and misjudgements also, without seeking to bully or intimidate fellow fans into suppressing conflicting views. The whole "X person isn't a real Clyde fan" or "I'm a better Clyde fan than you" schtick is proper playground stuff and it's not going to exactly make the club an attractive prospect to new or casual supporters, both of whom we need quite desperately if we are to maintain or grow our overall support in the years and decades to come.

Biding our time waiting for the arse to fall out of your hopeless team as it does two weeks out of three!

Falkirk FC - thank you!

Sorry, are you actually trying to say that signing a near-33-year-old striker would be better for the club's long-term health than having somewhere to play our games beyond next season?

It's been brought up many times over the past decade or so but each feasibility study on it has pretty promptly concluded with a big red cross. I've not seen it for some years now but the stadium is apparently in a profound state of ruin; it was also hardly a spectator's dream when the club first left. There was also chat of a stubborn elderly owner who was digging his heels in and wanting an unbelievable sum for the stadium/accompanying land, but that was a number of years ago now. Cumbernauld was our best shot but we never immersed ourselves as we should've and this latest furore probably serves as the death knell in terms of ever integrating into the town meaningfully. In saying that, we do have a large number of Cumbernauld area fans, but nowhere near as many as we could and should've if run more astutely since 1994.

The problem you'll have is that, if the sponsorship agreement was negotiated and made by people without the club's best interest's at heart, they could quite easily have negotiated a "you'll get £50k from us if Dumbarton win the title and a pig flies over The Rock on flag day" clause with a base rate of zero for some juicy free publicity. Hopefully these cowboys fail miserably and have to sell the club at a loss in six months!

I don't have any problem with the perceived hypocrisy of the council allowing Goodwillie for five years and then all of a sudden hitting the nuclear launch button like this upon his return a month later, because times change, people change, and for all we know there are new people calling the shots. The big problem I have is if - and I must stress, this is an if - it transpires that NLC did actually have a degree of autonomy over the policies and decision-making processes of NLL, as looks likely from that companies house listing. To then attempt to rewrite history with a tone of "well actually, we've opposed this all along!" would be enormously misleading.

The rape talk and legal stuff has been done to death so I'm reticent to go into it too much more, but unfortunately you need a lot more than convincing character statements to prove rape beyond reasonable doubt, as is the threshold for a criminal conviction. In this instance the evidence would also likely have had to feature a next-day blood sample to be able to determine the victim's blood alcohol levels (and therefore level of cognitive impairment at the time of the offence), alongside rather intrusive DNA samples soon after to prove that... well, you know. I don't profess to know any of the legal ins and outs of it whatsoever but if NLC own the land and building then I don't really see any reason why they couldn't get a legal order, in this instance especially, to prohibit certain individuals from entering the stadium or being present on the land they own. There's definitely a bit of explaining to do on their end, though, as companies house declares NLC as being a party with significant control over North Lanarkshire Leisure Ltd. The logical inference from this would be that NLC likely did have a say over NLL decision-making, contrary to the statement made earlier. With a local council election coming up, their attempts to distance themselves from any harbouring of Goodwillie for the last five years could be a piece of opportunistic politicking.

I don't disagree with the general gist of your post but my reading of the situation is that the board called it spot on in telling Raith, after their initial approach, that they had no interest in having Goodwillie return to Clyde. The outcome of that approach was then communicated to the Glasgow Branch of Clyde supporters - whether that was the result of a board member or Goodwillie blabbing, I've no idea. Upon finding this out, the Glasgow Branch - in their infinite wisdom - started to make a lot of co-ordinated noise, which then brought an independently wealthy, long-time individual backer (and possibly also a club sponsor too) to allegedly threaten to withdraw all future funding of the club if the board didn't make a U-turn. I don't know the timeline of events, but allegedly there were also concurrent threats made to the board that enough membership numbers would be rallied to call for an EGM and force a vote on the board's future. I'd also be surprised if Danny Lennon wasn't very keen for the deal to be done himself, given his general level of job security at the moment and historical statements on Goodwillie. As a result of these factors, the board seems to have been left in an almighty pickle with just a couple of days left of the loan window. I'm not even sure the footballing side of things was a consideration for them. Either they a) stuck to their guns and blocked Goodwillie's return, knowing that move would be harmful financially and very possibly result in their own forcible removal as board members or b) acquiesced, and caused the coming shitstorm. The former obviously looks like the much better choice as things stand, but only those with an inside knowledge of the club will know just how catastrophic that option could also have proved. Because of their being forced to choose between two utterly ruinous and high-risk outcomes, I don't apportion the crux of the blame to the board on this one. They get plenty wrong, but this seems like it was a total no-win scenario in terms of the club's health. If there are people with the relevant skills and the requisite affection and time to join the board, then new blood would of course be welcome - but as I alluded to above, those who know Clyde well will know that the club has struggled in terms of attracting or harbouring quality boardroom assets for many years now. That struggle has just become profoundly more biting. The board's next move is extremely important. I'm not sure whether their best move would be to be totally transparent about the series of events, but a robust and sincere statement has to come very soon, and it has to categorically state that David Goodwillie will never again play for Clyde FC. What happens with NLC will depend on how relations between the parties have been of late. They definitely improved circa 2018 through to 2020, but I suspect the board's decision to re-evaluate (again!) where the club's future lies has fractured the relationship somewhat even before now. We are in a horribly weak position to negotiate now, but we have to secure our future for the coming years so that we have a foundation from which to rebuild and try to gradually repair some of the seismic damage done to the club's reputation in recent years. When Goodwillie initially moved to Raith Rovers, I thought that this task would be tough to accomplish. It'll take some doing now.

Did a bit of digging to make sure I wasn't havering utter shite here, but what I remembered does appear to have been the case - Not to try to deflect any attention away from Clyde or Goodwillie here, but it was entirely needless for NLC to try and exonerate themselves from any kind of responsibility for Clyde's continuing presence at Broadwood. Their statement would've been sufficient without that wild attempt to rewrite history.