TonMan

You seem to be doing an alright job at acquiring people who've been with us lately so never know...

Agreed, would be a bit silly to lose out on a potentially decent talent because we were a wee bit worried the next manager wouldn't be so keen on him. Especially if the deal was on the table before the season ended.

Ultimately I'd imagine it's too big a risk to be signing players on long-term deals when we're still uncertain as to how good they are. Especially when players of all ages can end up with serious injuries, leaving with potentially earning a wage even if we know there's going to be a whole season when they're not playing at all. We'll be on a fairly tight budget, and if we're handing a player a deal that's longer than a year then we need to be close to certain they're worthy of it. Otherwise there's a risk you're using up a place in the squad on someone who's either not as good as you thought they'd be, or who's a permanent crock.

Good news, talented young player and had a couple of very good performances.

At the rate Sevco are going the SPFL might get their wish by not having to schedule a post-split game since they'll be down in 7th place.

Shown a lot of improvement from when he first signed as well. Still only 24 too and seems to be maturing into a very good player.

Duffy got us out of League One but despite our calamitous 13-14 season that was essentially the basic expectation for him when he came in. Our only real challengers financially/stature wise in that league were Dunfermline, and they had an absolute nightmare of a season. While we did show plenty of resilience in eventually getting promoted we shouldn't have been relying on the last day to go up ahead of Forfar and Stranraer. There's really no reason we shouldn't be at a mid-table level in the Championship - that's Duffy again just about hitting expectations, not punching above his weight. Until we collapsed our 16-17 season was genuinely excellent and there should be a lot of goodwill towards the guy for that, but ultimately goodwill can only go so far and it gets to a point where changes need to be made.

Players will be dumbfounded at seeing an attacking Rangers performance.

Nah, the 2-year deal would (or certainly should) have been at least partly dependent on Duffy having another good season and getting us a play-off spot again, either sustaining what we'd built in 16/17 or building on it. Instead he's gone backwards and a lot of our failings have been down to him. Wasn't much else that could've been done in the end.

He's done an alright job all things considered, but ultimately things started to fall apart this season and his tactical failings have been obvious. While some managers can last through poor spells on goodwill, he's not earned enough of that to be rewarded for increasing failures.

McCoist would be a grim appointment if that comes about. No confidence we'd improve if that were the case.

The Isa storyline was alright, quite liked the scene with Winston in the confessional. Mick's consistently crap though. And for someone known as a junkie does not do drugs. At all.

Didn't actually think that was too bad, Mick was shite as per usual though.

Better than last week but not saying much. At times it was alright but felt like a lot of scenes dragged on far too long. Does genuinely seem like they're trying to cram Mick into every single episode. Quite how a homeless man seems to be able to afford drink to that extent I have no idea. Also he never actually takes drugs...in spite of being an, eh, drug addict.

There's a really unrealistic, sort of silly feel the show has that wasn't there before that's kind of distracting. Like when the ball came to Jack and he managed to head it halfway up the pitch. Or Isa, a 70-something year old pensioner being able to dive across a bar to catch a bottle. The original series had the odd moment like that, i.e. the Big Innes episode but that was actually funny, and those moments were few and far between. As has been said the show used to focus on actual, plausible events which might affect pensioners. Now they tend to go for weird, special effects type moments too often. Navid's cameo was hilarious though. Need an episode which focuses on him and/or Tam.

Aye an improvement on last season.

It's certainly closer, but whether it's close enough to actually make a significant difference to fans who'd maybe go to a game but aren't really sure if they want to is another question. It's probably far, far better for fans coming from Tayside, right enough, although don't know how important it'll be for people travelling from Aberdeen.

There's definitely some pragmatism in there insofar as he's largely abandoned his anti-Trident and anti-monarchy positions since he knows they're not going to get him elected. But aye, considering he's spent most of his career as a backbench MP who's never really been too involved in government, it's a bit obvious he's kind of clueless when it comes to Scotland. As a ton of politicians south of the border unfortunately tend to be.

Interestingly apparently there's been Tory polling which has Labour comfortably ahead, with the rumour being that a lot of the pollsters are still going on 2015 models and are underestimating youth turnouts. Not sure how true that is though. Also probably worth noting that Corbyn tends to excel when he's actually in the midst of an election period. His polling before May called this year's GE was consistently grim but once campaigning was underway he improved massively. Still...should be doing a lot better considering the current government. I wonder if his own stance leaning towards a hard Brexit's turning off some voters and driving them to the Lib Dems or to not voting. Can imagine a fair few pro-EU types will be very frustrated at the Labour's front bench's insipid opposition to a hard Tory Brexit.

Additional news - can currently get better odds on her to win this than you can for Sarwar to win the leadership contest, apparently.

If they still have to parachute out of an airplane she'll be more than up to the task considering she's spent a good portion of her career in a party that's been free-falling from previously high heights.

Seems like Leavers more and more can't justify any of their actual points so instead continue resorting to "We won, get over it" since they've run out of anything genuine to say.

Their Wikipedia page states that they intend to "bring the entire EU project down." Which I'd imagine will be kind of hard for them to do considering we'll, you know, be outside the EU. Presumably they're not content with blaming our woes on the EU while we're part of it, and will now continue to blame just about everything that happens to us from dodgy fish suppers to rainy cold nights in Stoke on the EU anyway, cause why not...

Talking about their stadium woes bring back a memory of travelling to an away Scottish Cup tie when they were playing at Fir Park (I think?) and hearing upon almost arriving at the stadium that the game had been cancelled. Thankfully thumped them 3-0 when we did end up playing them.

Also worth noting that they managed to win it with 66 points in the end, a total that'd generally not be enough to see you go up. Even their first half of the 06-07 season was patchy, with a 4-0 defeat at home to Dundee and a run in which they only won one of seven games. Ultimately a few bouts of excellent form were enough to see them through.