AllyM

It was all taking a lille toulon to sort out.

If we'd gone with no relegation and a 13 team top league, we could have Hearts stepping in to play the fixtures when one of the big teams have had a night out on the lash

Sheron not even on bench, is he injured?

It's almost as if they don't want the St Mirroon pound.

Isn't he a legend at Hibs already? He's well under 30 games for them.

What have we got to do with it? It's no fair. We were NINTH when the fat lady started singing, just a few minutes after Jon Obika picked up the ball and ran with it into the Hearts net.

Sounds like a great idea. I hope the NHS are looking at a similar logic to reduce costs for terminal cancer tests.

It just all adds to our badness towards Hearts: Dundee 2 Hearts 0 - we sold the league to Celtic in 1986 St Mirren 3 Hearts 2 - we stole the league cup in 2013 St Mirren 1 - Hearts 0 - we relegated Hearts in March 2020 St Mirren 1 - Hearts 0 - we relegated Hearts again in April 2020 St Mirren 1 - Hearts 0 - we relegated Hearts again in May 2020 St Mirren 1 - Hearts 0 - we relegated Hearts again in June 2020 6 false positive CoVID tests - we blew Hearts arbitration argument about recommencing football in July out the window in July 2020 *St Mirren 1 - Hearts 0 - we relegated Hearts again in July 2020 *pending

So I guess one would classify this post as a "false negative" then?

I agree - but that is just incompetence and/or lack of training. False positives are false positives wherever in the process the cause lies .

Well yes, but that is a huge error. You can't run a testing system with that number of false positives (generously 6%, if 100 at the club were tested). A viable test system (from the sampling through the transport to the lab test itself) needs a false positive rate of much, much better than 1% . Otherwise it is a waste of time. Yesterday, Scotland reported 16,338 tests. This outfit could easily have reported close to 1,000 new positive cases with their level of accuracy/competency.

It sounds like there is a blueprint for finishing bottom then?

Slightly off topic, but what is the biggest collection of fans of your own team that you've ever been part of? Mine, for St Mirren, must be the Scottish cup final of 1987. The attendance (folk actually in the stadium) was listed as just over 50,000. I reckon St Mirren had a larger support that day than Dundee Utd, so I would put our support at around 30,000. That must be the largest gathering of our fans in the last 50 years and a fairly impressive number, if not quite the 200,000 gathered together in a bar in Seville a few years back. Over to you lot to wave yer willies.

...... which is a particular embarrassment in 1985-86 given that it was two points for a win that season. How did they manage to blow that?

I’m the connection. My youngest was born in Medway Maritime Hospital close to Christmas 2013 and the Gills players and then manager, Peter Taylor strolled in for a photo-op.. I was ‘in celebratory mode’ and had a quiet word about mutual reciprocity between the Gills and the buds. PT seemed so impressed he peeled away mid conversation, presumably to set the ball rolling. Saw Simeon Jackson score a 90th minute winner for the Gills at Wembley in the league 2 playoffs in 2009.

These things even out over time though. Remember 1986 when....... wait.

It is interesting that in addition to the 6 clubs listed, you could easily add Celtic, Rangers and Motherwell as already having a broadly similar perspective. It is rare to get so much consensus so quickly between the BIG CLUBS in Scotland. Budge should be given a lot of credit for that, in all fairness.

Fair point. There wasn't a superfluous apostrophe in your post - there were two (everybody' and club's). Poor show from DA Baracus,.

Aye but he’s talking about his own team here - 3-2 win over Motherwell

Steady tiger. You can buy a throat swab on line then send it back to a lab for testing. Or you can book a test online. But you can't "buy a testing kit" unless you have a real-time PCR machine at home to amplify up the relevant gene products.

Someone needs to invent play-doh that sorts itself back into its component colours at the end of a long day. With magnetic nanobeads of varying strength or some such. Anyone? You can buy a fairly decent fluorescent cell sorting machine (FACS machine) for about £30K but I think that might be overspec'd and it might get bunged up.

The absolute figures in terms of number of cases MUST be wrong as government advice for people with mild symptoms has been, for several days now, to stay at home, self isolate and don't call 111. So no-one will know how many of us have had it in a mild form. We can get estimates of the number of "mild" cases by proper random sampling of small (but big enough) groups and then extrapolating, but there is no indication that this is happening. We will need to know this number in the longer term to determine if our "herd immunity" strategy has worked or not. If we don't know how many people have had it and are immune (hopefully) - we won't know what to do when the second, third, fourth wave comes - which seems to be the main point of our "unique" strategy. In other words if you lock down too quick and most people don't get it, we'll have to keep locking down every few months until enough do or a vaccine comes along.

One problem is that they haven't told us what evidence they are using - they would be well served to make that public. There are some merits to their plan (say for schools, where, if they closed now, many kids would promptly be sent to their grandparents killing many of them as a result), but other aspects of it differ from what many other countries are doing or have done to date. One difference is that China and Italy had local hotspots which they locked down. Our cases seem more evenly spread, so perhaps it is right to take a different approach. I'm not sure, though - this is where we could do with more transparency on their thinking, at least for the benefit of those that have the expertise to comment on it either positively or negatively.

Our government's approach is the "Let's get CoVid19 done" approach. It's a viable approach, but if we get it even slightly wrong, there will be a large number of unnecessary deaths, primarily among the old and the otherwise sick. As far as I can see, no other country is adopting our approach at the moment.

Interesting angle on our goal last night.