CallumPar

You answered your own question before you asked it. Looks to me like McPake’s embracing his inner John Hughes and is playing Todd at RWB.

I think the club need to assess what’s gone wrong this season. The contact injuries or injuries like KRH’s shoulder are obviously unavoidable. But the extent of our issues can’t just be bad luck. The amount of muscular injuries, or tendon/ligament issues is a concern. It could be the quality of surface we’ve been training on. If so, all the more reason to make sure the new facilities are excellent. It could be that the medical team (physio, sports scientist) haven’t done their job to the required standard. They should be monitoring players and helping to avoid a lot of the muscular injuries, as well as ligament/tendon issues. In the modern day, there is a lot of technology and tests that can be done quickly and easily, which can help to reduce the risk of these things and pick up issues before they become more serious. Maybe the club need to invest more money into that side of things? It could be the coaching staff/players just not listening to advice, or trying to hide injuries until they become really serious. Particularly looking at Bene/Breen for this one, who got muscular injuries immediately upon returning from injury - twice. Worth adding, these are just some of the possible reasons for this and I’m not suggesting any of them are necessarily correct. It could even be a combination of them all. But it needs to be assessed to make sure we don’t go through this again.

Gonna be honest, even if we beat them next month, I can’t see them being too upset about it come the end of the season. They’ll finish first or second in the league, having beaten us 4 times in 6 games against us, while we battle to avoid relegation. I’m not sure how they’ll be looking foolish there?

Fair enough. I’m just going off what the article said. I can’t find much about him online, because he’s a 27 year old, with less than 150 career appearances. I was assuming he could play CB, since it’s a CB we’re desperate for. We’re ok at RB and I’m hoping we ditch the back 3 for good, so don’t want to sign someone to play RWB.

According to our announcement on the website, yes. But he can play CB and midfield too.

Not played many games for an experienced player. Sounds like he’s quite versatile though, which will obviously be handy. Hopefully this one works out.

Hopefully an experienced defender. Maybe Paul Hanlon?

It’s easy to have good fan engagement when things are going well on the park. Just look at us last season. That being said, the use of social media etc from Rovers has been excellent this year. Lightyears ahead of us on that front. From what I’ve seen, your board are trying lots of new things and actively looking for fan feedback/opinions. You’re getting a lot right on and off the park this season.

You’ve held a lead for 147 out of the 180 minutes between the sides this season and won both games, having taken the lead in the 12th and 21st minute of each game. We have been much worse recently, than we were going into either of those games. We’ve scored 1 goal in our last 4 games, it’s hard to throw away a lead against a team that can’t score goals.

Didn’t realise either of these things, to be fair and it’s genuinely good to know. If he’s co-ordinating a group of scouts that are going to watch potential signings, then that’s fair enough and I’ve misunderstood his role. For clarity, my comments on this weren’t ever intended as an attack on him, my questions were aimed at the set up of this role/department and not the employee himself. As I say, from what I’ve heard, he is a good scout and helped identify a lot of the good players we signed when Crawford was here.

I believe the guy played a big role in finding talent when Crawford was in charge. If that’s the case, giving him this role has ended up making him totally ineffective in his scouting role now. edited to remove the references to deleted post.

I don’t understand why so much focus/frustration about transfers has been aimed at the board - Cook and Meggle in particular. I don’t know enough about what’s going on to know who’s to blame. I’d guess they just seem like easy targets, particularly if people are keen to shift the blame from the manager/players. If we believe the stories that terms were agreed with Dundee for Byrne, Ashcroft and Rudden, there’s not anymore they could have done. The players just chose a better option. But we should have had backups for all of them. To date, Kane instead of Rudden is the only alternative we’ve seen. We also didn’t really seem to have a backup option for Wotherspoon. I don’t know whose fault that is, but it seems like we’re making the same mistakes repeatedly both on and off the park and not learning from them. I’m also really questioning our scouting. We can’t identify targets that are good enough (based on signings we’ve made). But, particularly when we need to strengthen, I’m fed up of seeing our chief scout setting up drills for our first team’s warm up and sitting in our dugout every Saturday. Surely he should be out scouting players - it seems like an important part of the job. If our main targets are all players that McPake/Mackay have identified, having worked with them before, what is our chief scout actually doing to justify that role?

Taylor Sutherland has made a decent number of appearances? When did this happen? He’s an 18 year old kid that’s played less than 90 minutes of first team football for the club. edit to add - I’m not defending McPake here. I think he seems totally out his depth. But the number of first team injuries has constantly been between 7 and about 12 for 5 months now - and that’s not including guys playing through injuries. It’s absolutely mental to try and suggest that we do, or even should, have the depth of squad that can cover that.

These are very poor examples, since neither of these examples were loans that were made in the loan window. The media have reported that you can only bring in players from higher divisions in this window, but there are examples that disprove this. For example, we brought in Wighton on loan from Hearts in the loan window.

Completely agree with the first part. When everything’s going wrong on the park and we can’t get signings over the line, why are we even discussing things like that? Section North West getting emptier every week, fan engagement has gone so far backwards and we’re arranging a trip to St Pauli for directors and then actually bragging about it on social media. GTF with that nonsense. I would honestly expect so much more from the supporters trust. That’s absolutely ridiculous, how can a supporters trust be so out of touch with the actual supporters? Those in charge at the club seem so far from connecting with/caring about fans right now. Are they totally oblivious to how fans are feeling right now? Because it certainly feels that way. Regarding the second part of your post, I definitely did need to apologise. I’ve been a knob today and subjected everyone to my s**t - particularly you. We’re all frustrated/scunnered/fed up, but shouldn’t be taking it out on each other. Sorry again, hope all’s well with you. I’ll buy you a pint if I ever end up meeting you in person!

Aye, fair. It’s just something that’s annoyed me since the Aird thing, if I’m being honest. Add that to my frustration that we can’t seem to actually complete the signing of any of the players we need and I’ve gone on a stupid rant. Apologies to everyone. Especially @HoBNob. Nothing personal at all, I’ve just ended up ranting and venting aimlessly today and you seemed to keep prodding at me.

The club have had issues for years with information getting leaked. People within the club have been leaking stories for years. The courier and daily record get their info from somewhere - and the manager has denied a lot of the transfer rumours (even when true), so it’s not him. I remember someone leaking that Aird was signing a contract, just for Dundee United to phone his agent while he was on his way to East End to sign it. There’s been lots of examples of info being leaked like this over the years. People at East End can’t keep their mouths shut - as others have alluded to in this thread over the last couple of weeks. edited to remove a lot of the stupid s**t. Aware it’s far from the biggest issue, I’m just frustrated with the club right now.

Ashcroft's a solid championship defender. Old school centre half, dominant in the air in both boxes. Would back him to score against us, since we can’t defend set-pieces and he’s a big threat from them. Not got any pace, but his positional sense is very good and he reads the game well.

Also, can I just add - if there’s any truth in the ‘leaked’ info about us agreeing terms with Dundee for Byrne and Ashcroft, everyone involved with leaking this info and allowing Raith to swoop in, can f**k right off. I’d much rather we kept our business quiet and got it done, than had people spreading this info before anything’s signed, resulting in players getting better offers. That goes for the insiders at the club leaking the info and the attention seekers who then post it online to boost their ego.

I honestly have no idea what’s going wrong. But it’s clear that we can’t get deals over the line for players that we need. As a club, we need to get our s**t together.

100%. Can’t criticise Ashcroft at all. But we’ve apparently been targeting an experienced defender for 6/7 weeks now. Not added any, but Raith have added 2 (both on loan) in that time. Something’s not right at the club, if we can’t bring in the players we need.

3 of us posted that at the same time sums up our transfer business this season though.

Based on what though? A podcaster posting a rumour? The same ‘source’ posted in August about us announcing one or two signings one week. One being a former youth player. I would imagine the player he was speculating about is the same one that’s playing for Raith Rovers now. I think the other player being speculated about was another that didn’t sign - who went to Inverness and is now at United. So I’m not sure I’ll trust his rumours.

I think people just want to believe these things, so they can moan about it. If any of those things are true, it is ridiculous. But I’d be very surprised if that’s the case.