KelvindaleJag

My late father used to say that a compulsory substitution would be a better option. For those of us with real lives to get on with, the minutiae of rule changes aren't worth keeping up with. I can still remember the perfectly legal tackle from behind, and when intention simply didn't matter when adjudging offences. Oh, and indirect free kicks for obstruction, which is now part of every defender's skillset. Are changes driven by a thought for paying customers?

The previous 2 managers didn't know how to build a team. Their dross is all we have, until at least the next window. McCall has even stopped being diplomatic: he hooked Saunders after the latter sold a goal for a young Govan loanee midfielder, although there was no other centre back. A winter clearout is inevitable.

Why do I pay full price for entertainment, only to have an official decide that for 85 minutes one team has to have 10 players while the other has 11? Driving away potential fans to slake an official's need to display his power! (I thought that somewhere in the higher echelons of the institutionalised corruption that is football, someone realised that the double punishment of a penalty and a red card was excessive.) The referee should pay 85/90 of the entry fee back to each fan that complains!

This is over-egged (and who says we Jags supporters can't be drama queens?), but actually expresses the two problems which any new structure will have to cope with: allowing the emergence of majority opinion to make strategic decisions and also allowing a minority view to be expressed. My view is that we can manage those problems with reasonable success. Most football clubs in the UK don't operate that way. Instead of adopting decision-making by a broader fanbase and growing used to it, their structures are still based on the small factory-owners' approach from the century before last: what we say goes, because we own you. The fear of entering a different, more inclusive era is, at times, almost palpable, but surely the old ways are increasingly inappropriate. They almost destroyed this football club in the time of STJ; another, ostensibly more successful, club south of the Clyde fared even worse; yet another, after trying to find a harbour in various places, has been stranded away from Glasgow and its original fanbase. For the time being, we can relax, knowing that funds are not going to dry up even although there will be financial and personal challenges as a new model is introduced and adapted. Regardless of the eventual structure, strategic decisions will go wrong sometimes. Others have fared worse: Bayern München had a tax evader as its President; Barça has staggering amounts of debt, with nobody held accountable. Scottish and English football clubs run by businessmen collapse from time to time. For our club's long-term future, it may well be more important that we have funding for the academy. We have a committed manager, a settled home and the glimmerings of a long-term future rather than just racing to reach the end of this or the next season without going insolvent. Little of that is vulnerable to fans' bad or good decision-making.

Normally, I'd agree, as all successful teams are built on effective defences, but my thought was that a short-term fix would be the only possibility mid-winter.

This is a recurrent scenario, in different seasons in various places. You would imagine that the league would have figured out by now that certain aspects of the game would benefit from the clubs getting together to run unified systems - but no, the mantra seems to be that cooperation is bad. Imagine the clout of all the professional clubs in Scotland, if they wanted to improve fans' experience! Competing bus companies can do it to provide over-60s with fare-free rides, but it's too difficult for the SPFL. Maybe they could contract these difficult matters out to a civil service department of the Scottish Government.

So what, apart from ditching most of the players, would you like to see done at the break? My suggestion would be just to accept that the defence is rank and get a first-rate goalkeeper behind them - say, a youngster on loan from a second-ranking German side (learning English is a selling point). Someone else has pointed out that Tomáš Černy is warming the bench at Aberdeen. Fox is adequate but inconsistent, and we can't afford that. My view is that Sneddon was and is a better option, but perhaps there are reasons for Fox being preferred. The midfield needs to be gutted, and we need at least one striker, as Millar needs someone to play off and Mansell misses, even when he's in the right place. Scouring the Juniors should have been an option long ago, given the woeful performances, as at least we could get some grit in the team - something that has been missing for years, in several managers' lineups.

The two goalkeepers were the best players on the park. Why the QoS backline decided to cut out the midfield with long balls although our midfield consisted of slow shirkers is a mystery. Unlike some other commentators, I see the biggest problem for the Jags as a midfield without any heart. How anyone dressed in red and yellow on a green field of play can disappear like them is also a mystery.

At one time, Hungary was one of the world's leading football nations - perhaps much as so many aspired to be like Brazil (until the German 7-1 demolition), Hungary was an example to follow. https://www.hungarianfootball.com/category/history/

Results are what count, whatever you think of the manager. Our club doesn't have the resources to experiment and take many defeats while the manager finds his feet: that was tried with Campbell and Archibald, and the inevitable conclusions of their careers as manager were far too late, which was down to the board(s) being indecisive. Unless Caldwell puts together a run of wins pronto, he should be on his way.

The Jags' defence consists of a trio of slow centre backs, the reluctance of individual players to use both feet is re-establishing itself and for most of play the midfield goes down one player because, although he can score, he does little else. (No, those up front don't pose much of a goal threat.) Sneddon, if played, keeps us in the game. If pushed, I'd hazard a guess at 1-4.

If Thistle don't do something to get a couple of half-decent, pacey fullbacks, the defensive record is going to be torrid this season: the whole defence is slow, and as for the midfield - Bannigan gave away almost as much as he recovered, Penrice was well behind play and Gordon took advantage of the absence of our normal unmissable red-and-yellow colours to hide somewhere. Alloa Athletic's manager had done his homework: the Thistle defence was repeatedly at sixes and sevens on the wings, with little cover from a stretched midfield and central defenders drawn out of position. The home side had acres of space in midfield: nobody was closed down, and there was no pressing from Thistle. At one point, the panic among the Thistle players was palpable, with every single player in the Thistle half. Mansell wants to while away his time out on the wing, presumably because, despite his height, he can't head the ball: his big opportunity in the box came and the ball flew well past him. Pass marks for Sneddon, Cardle and Millar, although Cardle and Bannigan seem to have started a competition to see who is the most one-footed player in the team. (Cardle was repeatedly shepherded away from goals, but didn't have the wit to pass or the confidence to use his left foot.) Unless the team is changed to some variant of a 4-man defence for the next outing, the pace of the next game will be dictated by the opposition, and Shankland will be gifted plenty of opportunities.

No, not sardonic - just cynical. Caldwell has obviously watched the film Moneyballs (about baseball and the introduction of algorithm-generated buying and selling decisions) but ignored how Germany was chased out of the newly expanded World Cup in 2018. (The computers had to be transported back to Germany, which revealed the extensive use of statistical analysis.) Gaming leagues (as opposed to knockout cups) by calculating spending against winning combinations of players isn't really feasible in Scotland, unless it's one of a range of techniques for the big two to gain over each other. For most clubs, the parameters are too wide to allow predictions (weather, injuries, forced sales, etc.) and forming a team from disparate individuals, as McNamara did, takes a human understanding of what works. (That flair had/has its downside, of course, as we've seen.) If AI could win football, China would have been a world champion long ago, but instead its football is a morass of corruption and failed/renamed clubs.

If the kind of algorithm-chosen team that turned out against Clyde is to be the future, then we're in for some grimly unentertaining games. Just enough to win, but so many weaknesses that show why AI is never going to be more than another tool for coaches. This isn't baseball, whatever Caldwell may think.

If we're generous, the motivation of the old-new board may be bringing about or protecting from a takeover, dependent on the predicted benefit or disadvantage. There seems to be little incentive for a takeover, but the tie-up with Kingsford Capital - a kenspeckle outfit if there ever were one - was also a mystery. Could there be a connection, or is it just simply that loss-makers such as football clubs are very valuable, er, "assets" in the opaque world of investment?

So the plans for a hospital wing at the new training ground can be put on hold, then? The approach to strength and fitness overall has increased the resilience of players, and perhaps the change in the personnel dealing with it (or not) was the cause. The loudest alarm for any manager (regardless of the business) should be staff absence statistics, but before Caldwell's arrival it seemed to be regarded as a trivial matter.

Wasn't there a rule about 6 weeks per injury per player? Apart from misdiagnoses, injuries after returning, etc. obviously.

Or you could just bother to read Bannigan's own words (in the link): '“It ended up being more than 15 months out because we didn’t know what was happening at the start and wasted four or five months,” he revealed. “The operation could have been done straight away. But it is what it is."'

The club's injury record speaks for itself, and there might, in any case, be a suspicion that the medical care given by the club at least contributed to an extended period of injury, sicne misdiagnosis was at least partly to blame. https://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/football/15412346.Stuart_Bannigan_glad_to_be_back_for_Partick_Thistle_after_16_month_injury_nightmare/

I was considering reinstating mine (with a half-season ticket), but the way things haven't changed has made me reconsider: the board needs to take a long, hard look at how it's squandering funds.

It is increasingly looking as if Caldwell and Archibald were looking up exercises in the same Modern Football Management for Dummies or whatever the latest fashionable coaching manual in English is - avoiding any kind of direct approach, central midfield penetration or distance shots; endless series of crosses from the wings; setting up a team to defend regardless of capability, confidence or opposition,... Tactically, the team is no better than when it lost to a managerless side.

Not to mention the enjoyable sight of injured players recovering - only to disappear immediately with other injuries. Oh, and did anybody mention icepacks for existing injuries, or the flexibility of "six weeks"? Maybe Caldwell is preparing us for a better future after all.

The board's statement (overlooking the idiosyncratic grammar) "if we are to still achieve our aim [of promotion this season], a change had to happen now" suggests that the incoming manager will be required to achieve promotion in 3/4 of a season, largely using players picked by his successor - in other words, either a supremely confident candidate or one with nothing to lose by taking a gamble. Given the current position of 3rd bottom, is that a challenge that any of those suggested would even want to take up? They might feel that they'd be set up to fail. Of course, most newly appointed managers get into that position by taking on failure in the first place, but not usually with such a limited time to achieve an objective.

The club and the first team's performance are what matter. Perhaps being closely attached to a manager is a defect. After all, even at the top European level, the likes of Guardiola, Mourinho and Klopp are just mercenaries. The days of long-time loyal employees like Davie McParland are long gone.

Surely you want a former player (who was also a Jags player)?