harry94

He had a twitter page on the go a while back and half of the posts was about Corbyn and being 'irresponsible with finance' and the other half was LinkedIn pish.

We didn't see a lot of him. Come into the team V Alloa and played well. Started the next game at Morton and didn't have a great time so was subbed at half time then had a couple of sub appearances before injury. I think he'll do well though when given another shot at this level.

That's what I was thinking re Ross. They don't actually want to do First Ministers questions, things worked the best for them when Dugdale was most prominent (or at least as prominent as Davidson) in this role and there wasn't too much attention paid to it. Just a solid 'no divisive indyref 2' platform with little noise on anything else (let alone making an arse of yourself in COVID briefings) apart from education and that's the formula that gets them their 20-25% of likely voters in the regional ballot.

He isn't that stupid, I doubt he's read these documents but he's obviously got some skill at committing crime to get away with it. He's just trying to inflame tensions. If there's a bit of a swing and the election is close in some states, he'll take it through the courts. Also, if he can cause some trouble and rile up his nutjobs who disrupt things on the day of the election, that could present a window of opportunity for the state governors to suspend things.

What's the rumour re sell on clause?

We had a dreadful January in which we got humped by Dunfermline, Inverness and Motherwell with ease. A game V Ayr, scheduled, was postponed. We got them in March and just before lockdown, our double header saw us take advantage over them, if the season finished, that would have had positive implications for the play-off. A lot of these scenarios in football are just unpredictable, new manager effects for example are a real concept (much harder to prepare your tactics when the opposition are changing their playing style). It certainly is the most straight forward intuitive answer to suggest that we're in a worse position but it's difficult to quantify what that exactly means. The avg better performance in points per game last season for teams playing at home isn't huge (significantly closer to 0 than 1) and after that, you're really just looking at all these nuances and scenarios surrounding circumstances of individual games (like my example above). It's unlikely that teams will be coming out of this season with genuine grievances about the home/away split and having to play (this seasons very poor) sides on astro that they'll be able to back up tangibly as being the decisive factor in failure. This isn't the Trans-Siberian league spanning multiple continents and climates and potentially encountering hostile environments, it's a case of a group of mostly central based players having to play at some grounds (that they are already likely familiar with) a bit more than others.

I don't think definitively either way, we've been one of the 5/10 who are unlucky with the extra away fixture but that's the reality of the 27 game season, it is what it is. I don't think there's much point in trying to be too analytical over any of that and we were always going to face this sort of issue. It's all immaterial if the squad don't perform anyway.

Spinning it another way, home to Raith, Dunfermline and Morton who we've always had issues traveling to. The astro teams finished in the bottom 3 and we picked up wins there last term (early draw at QotS reflective of our form at the time), indeed those would be the exact games you would want to play away from home. We also did well at Ayr last term. You could also argue that Hearts coming early is a big benefit if it takes time for them to get going, which it sometimes does for the bigger sides in this league (see us in 13/14, we were pish at the start). I don't really see any reason to be wound up by any of this tbh. Teams all went into a computer and 50% of sides were always going to be slightly worse off.

I was really shocked finding out a few years back just how lucrative the carehome business is. Get the right contacts and you can easily pass on the risks to the tax payer and reap all of the rewards. Very easy to rip the pish with how you set salaries etc when if the company does go insolvent, you're contracts are lucrative enough to pass onto a newco which you're likely to be a part of. I'm optimistic though that a lot of this will be dismantled though, looks like the tide is changing and it'll be a popular viewpoint in 2021.

At least he can quote these days.

I remember at kick off some guy behind me started rambling through his bets "EH'VE GOT 3-0 DUNDEE, 4-0 DUNDEE, HEMMINGS TO SCORE A HAT-TRICK, STEWART TO SCORE A HAT-TRICK, HARKINS TO SCORE A HAT-TRICK" . Don't think we heard another peep out of him.

And of course, Nicola has the time and will to spend time with random members of the public to coordinate these activities. MSM ignoring a smoking gun.

Rogers would be fine, 26 now and fairly experienced at this level. Rohan may be decent but I think would be a bigger risk, not seen enough of him to know how consistent he is. There's 5 or 6 in League One and Two down south who are free agents now. I imagine there will be a fair few more surplus with the cost cuts.

I was at one of the Stirling games where Ferrie played and thought he looked class. I think his height may be an issue which limits him but I don't think he'd be chucking many in at the very least. I think we probably fucked him over a bit last season by letting him stay as no 2. By the time we decided to loan him out, there weren't any obvious candidates in L1. I always think TW did quite a good job at getting well suited loans for his young players coming through.

McDaid carried us for quite a lot of the early season games, we'd have been well down the table without him. A bit raw but he's been a good signing IMO and it's realistic he can kick on.

I don't think that's a grey area, it would very blatantly be the manager working. I guess that's why QotS Raith Rovers have went down the part-time route. I doubt anyone is going to report a couple of conversations though. They'll just say one of the BoD processed it.

Where is that figure coming from? Just from the snippets of articles I can find in the US, I don't get the impression that the business was nearly that lucrative, the sites with any sort of account data from that period seem to come back with revenues that are relatively low and any press reports on the sale of his stations suggested a cash transaction of something in the low millions. If he's taken in money into the hundreds of million for his contracts, he must have been trading in an astronomically massive amount of money to handle that risk, the business these contracts were listed as being sold to just appear to be a small affair and list row revenues. His current software venture looks to me to be a small distributor with a few employees. If there's something which takes him up a scale to what is being suggested, it's all got to be hidden in property. I've always been curious as I've always tried to track Keyes and it looks particularly difficult to get a real sense of wealth in the US. Much harder without companies house!

Byrne was widely regarded as a bit of a coup when we signed him, wouldn't be surprised if he went on loan to a top flight team to save on his wages.

I don't know what reality some fans live in. United have had a management team who have operated like complete diddies for 5 years, they finally get someone who is competent, taking 58 points from three rounds of fixtures this term (which only Rangers and Hearts have bettered in the last decade) and then he's still getting plenty of stick at the manner of winning. Teams don't stroll the second tier and win it playing brilliant football, it's a shitfest. Losing your manager in the window after promotion has potential to be disastrous, just look at St Mirren a couple of seasons back who accumulated a very good points total heading up and were only saved by a historically bad Dundee after the Stubbs debacle. Not only have United lost a good manager, it's the worst possible time for it to have happened.

That's a cracking appointment. Hearts have never really recovered from his departure and his return to Scottish football has seen him do the business with United in first full season of asking (and his contribution the season before seeing a form equivalent to decent league winners who were already far ahead). Prediction is for him to similarly do quite well but then be hounded out the club again for not winning cup competitions within 2 seasons and then him to head down south and fail again, the cycle will then repeat.

That's kind of what I'm getting at. The default to PPG and no play offs killed any opportunity of a compromise to take account of anyone else. Moving on to the reconstruction phase we did was going to be impossible to navigate as it returned everyone to their basic self interest in trying to bring things to a default mode. There was nothing to leverage against it.

It's a fair point. The executive come up with the PPG settlement and worked very quickly to legitimise it into something actionable and gave advice on this, as they are entitled to do. They were also briefing that pay outs were absolutely impossible without this specific wording and didn't really have an opportunity to be properly critiqued. We were told that any sort of method of paying out early and realigning in future seasons or even just resolving to pay out in full on PPG but formally leave the season partially open was completely impossible. When some of the chairman did make references to this sort of action as an alternative, they were quickly derided as not having a credible plan as they hadn't yet had the opportunity to arrange for the relevant groundwork to actually properly assess it. I'm not saying it was necessarily the wrong decision but there simply wasn't any time to actually consider alternatives and the advice was still coming out on Friday. If the board had actually allowed a few days for another resolution to be properly constructed, I think the rifts would have been more resolvable, especially if the alternative naturally run out of steam and was methodically dismantled.

The season before, Hearts had a streamlined squad with a team of departures after admin and then only Danny Wilson in (after that debacle re his registration), quite a few promising youngsters had their chance that season and looked promising. Levein and Neilson come in on 12th May after a long time plotting for the end of the season and Hearts clearly had their house in order with quite a bit of early business that had then 7 or 8 additions before pre-season started more than a month later. Neilson is a very good manager at this level and moulded a very good squad together which could consistently dominate games and had goals in them - similar to his changes at United. A big thing that fucks over relegated teams more than anything else is when they come down with the management situation up in their air and then have a squad of players on the books who consist of has-beens who are draining top 6 wages and little prep in place for how they are going to move them on (or indeed uncertainty about some important players staying) and recruit. Hearts should (and probably will) win the league very comfortably with their respective size and October is long enough away but I think there's real potential for this to go quite badly. The smaller season as well could be a particular disadvantage, not as much time to claw back a deficit after a bad start.