rgreig

So, home win?

I firmly believe it's the coaching as I have said many times before. It is clear the players are not clear on how the formation should be implemented particularly out of possession. The championship is full of journeyman players. A team with a good coach and just a couple of slightly higher quality forward players should do well. Last season we had an outstanding forward player and a dud coach. This season we are left with the dud and the outcome is entirely predictable.

Bullen can point to individual errors, but anyone who is a neutral would say that QP fully deserved the draw yesterday. Yet again Bullen was out-thought by another manager in the division. While other managers make substitutions or formation changes to turn games in their favour, Bullen specialises in doing the opposite. When the opposition retains possession we are particularly ineffective and rely on individual brilliance. Take Murphy and Chalmers out our team and we cannot compete.

Maybe he has failed to hit a target he was given. I think it's 8 points since the start of October. He certainly had quite an OOT reaction to the person in the stand who took him to task about his substitutions.

I saw this as I was leaving and Bullen was clearly very unhappy at the (entirely valid and fair) criticism. He's clearly rattled by people criticising him. Poor team selection, poor substitutions, team poor out of possession again. Sums up Bullen as a coach completely.

I was watching the stream so it was harder for me to see the shape clearly, but from what I could tell it seems that Senga's positional sense and discipline was far better than Young's. If he keeps that up then to me it's a no-brainer to start him over Young. I also thought that Stanger had some good passes out of defence and I would start him over Musonda. On Dowds, I really don't understand why Thistle let him go out on loan. I know he was impacted by injury last season but if you look at his stats for the league and Scottish Cup, he scored a goal every 135 minutes last season. That is an excellent stat, particularly considering that he wasn't getting a consistent run in the team due to injury. Maybe they think Adeloye will have an even better return than that, and who knows they might be right about that.

We have two very talented players in Murphy and Chalmers who allow us to create chances going forward. I don't think anybody can dispute that (and it's great to have players who can actually take decent corners at long last). However, we are just nowhere when out of possession. Our formation could be described as 4-WTF-2. As you rightly pointed out later in your post, the midfield is culpable in the first-half shambles. To me, this is a coaching issue since it's not something that has just been an issue since Dempsey and Murdoch were injured - it's a hallmark of Bullen's teams. Although you could say we were unlucky not to score one of the other chances we created, I also felt that Raith could easily have gone in 3-0 up at half time and they had one very good chance in the second half as well. It is very clear to me that Raith have better coaching staff than we do. Dowds looked good I thought and I think he's likely to start every week if he remains fit.

It was the same as the Partick game. Terrible positioning and lack of discipline when out of possession, particularly in midfield. Not helped by the obvious weakness in the RB position. I would bite your hand off for 8th right now.

I really hope so. Last night for me it was very clear that the biggest issue was not recruitment but the coaching. We have a couple of talented players and some very average players but a decent coach could get a lot more out of the team I think by just sorting out the basics.

There has been a lot of discussion about the recruitment but for me it's the coaching that is the most glaring deficiency in the team. I have no idea what Bullen tells the players to do when they come out - we just give the opposition a great deal of possession, and don't even do the basics of competing for the ball when the opposition gets a throw-in (e.g. lead up to first goal last night). There are acres of space between defence and midfield at times due to lack of midfield discipline and a better team than Partick would have exploited that even more. 4-0 is not going to be even close to our heaviest home defeat if things continue as they are. I think that our only hope is that McGeady -whether you like him or not, he's not an idiot - is telling Smith and Mathie exactly how inept the coaching is.

I think we are looking at one more player coming in? I don't have much to add beyond what several others have said, but I think the interesting dynamic is what McGeady will be saying to Mathie. It's slightly unusual having a player with a dual role and reporting to someone other than the manager/first team coach. It will give Mathie another insight into Bullen's performance as a coach.

If we aren't sending any emails at all to people due to the marketing preferences that must cause a lot of entirely avoidable issues. GDPR specifically distinguishes between transactional emails and marketing emails and you are allowed to send transactional emails (which are defined at a very high level as being triggered by an interaction with a business's website) irrespective of marketing preferences. I don't know what it is like from the club's perspective but as a user of the total tickets platform to buy tickets I find it a confusing mess. I can only imagine how bad it must be for people who are not comfortable with technology. I have always found the club to be very prompt in responding to and solving the various issues I have had with tickets but the overhead in administering it must be very frustrating.

I obviously don't know what targets they were both set at this time last season, but I think it's fair to assume they both met or exceeded those targets. On that basis I think it would have been extremely unreasonable to exit them. But this year's targets will be more challenging. The point about the starting eleven only having two changes from last season is probably something that Bullen would agree with - we know that we have missed out on several key targets already this season so it is clear that this was not the plan. Whether anyone is specifically to blame for that or whether it is just where we are financially I don't know. I ended up being unable to go to the game yesterday which sounds like it was lucky for me! Finally, on Ahui I would not write him off yet. I have a friend who is a Lincoln fan who told me that he is a good footballer and should do well for us (and he usually sets quite a high bar). As a point of comparison when we signed Maguire he told me he was a waste of space and would do absolutely nothing for us. I can only hope that he is as right about Ahui as he was about Maguire!

Does anyone know if away fans will be able to get into the stand today? (I thought that one end of the stand could be used by the away support?)

I do think our attendance is a bit odd. We seem to have a very strong core support which is translates into excellent away support (I haven't worked it out but I would imagine our away to home support ratio must be one of the best in the division). But other clubs that on the face of it should be similar to ours manage to outsell us by a significant margin. Marketing has been very poor during this close season and I won't reopen the whole discussion about the improvement that is needed in the use of social media as a marketing tool. I guess we should really be focussed on overall attendance though. I have said in the past that I think that a season ticket is very simplistic legacy pricing model and that with digital ticketing we should be looking at other pricing models to create incentives to attend etc. It does come down to the technology though and it's clear the club does not have service providers in that space who are up to the mark.

You know your club is in a perilous financial state when they halve the number of mascots. We will only truly believe Smith is serious about this project when we have a minimum of three.

I noticed this too and wondered if I was overanalysing it, but since you have also immediately spotted it then perhaps not. He was clearly brought in by Mathie since he mentioned him numerous times and only mentioned "Lee" (not "gaffer" or "the manager") once.

That's great to hear. I think this will be the real test of Mathie and Glendinning - can we now genuinely strengthen the overall squad addressing the positions we have all said need significant improvement. If we end up getting 150k or whatever it is, and then end up finishing 6th then I think then is when people can genuinely ask questions about the strategy and their part in it. On the topic of the season ticket fiasco, I am still on holiday so haven't been concerned about attending games but the lack of communication is quite odd and is rightly being called out as unacceptable. I would suspect that they had much stronger demand than expected but didn't have much technology or automation to support the administration of it and are now up against it trying to sort it out in a period when staff will be on holiday. It looks like their ticket provider is perhaps not the finest solution in the market either. If what I have written is close to accurate then this is where they should have held their hands up and perhaps asked for some volunteers in the support to provide some help - many of us who are employed in IT deal with these kinds of things all the time.

I think you could be onto something here. I don't think it would be a cheap option - if you turn some media students loose on this you would in all likelihood end up with a disaster however if it was done as a partnership between a further education institute it could fit into Smith's stated desire to support community initiatives. It would need experienced professionals to underpin and support it but if done well it could give long term benefits to both the club and the institutions (as well as the students obviously).

I agree. It would be entirely pointless to try to force companies to interview externally - it would just waste everyone's time since if you have an internal candidate lined up you can always just give them the job in the end. If there is a good internal candidate it is nearly always preferable to looking externally since it reduces risk. There are things that are difficult to assess in a few hours of interview whereas you will have years of feedback on some internal candidates. I think it is very positive that the club is able to give new opportunities to volunteers or existing staff and hopefully that can continue as the club grows.

I don't see why the club would rush at all. Whatever people say about the level of the Scottish Championship, we are selling a player who was comfortably the top scorer in the division last season and also the player of the year. That is a scarce resource and the club's directors have a duty to maximise the value they receive. For every one of us who is clamouring to get the money for him, there are also fans and directors of other clubs who know they need a proven goalscorer. We just need to hold our nerve and trust that we have people negotiating who understand the true market value.

Surely you mean 3.

You are absolutely right, I can't count! That 700k is significant. Fortunately, Dunfermline only made £82,780 above their minimum income from prize money. But still, if they can keep a good number of those supporters for next season they will have a very healthy budget.

Yes, it was just prize money. I hadn't actually considered that the gate receipts would be worth so much but of course they will be, especially since the semi-final receipts are the aggregate split four ways. I don't know if ICT have debts that urgently need to be paid off but if not then it should be a really interesting season ahead for them. I think Dodds is a good manager so if he recruits well they should be serious title contenders.

Yes this is true although I assume the clubs reasonably accurately budget for gate receipts. I don't think the delta is as much as 700-900k though. Dunfermline had a total attendance in league 1 this season of 85,969 (according to Transfermarkt). That compares with 61,450 last season in the championship, so a very healthy increase indeed. We had 35,020 in 21/22 and 39,829 this season (which is a decent increase too). Assuming the average ticket cost is £15 that would be about 325k extra revenue. You can add catering revenue too to that. I also calculated the prize money above the minimum the clubs could have budgeted for. I am not sure whether Dundee Utd's money from their European games was known ahead of time or not and it was significant. But the key figures are (these are the deltas above the minimum): Ross County - £75,750 Dundee Utd - £624,520 or £59,020 depending on how you budget Europe Inverness - £569,300 Ayr - £469,800 Partick - £289,420 Queen's Park - £272,100 Raith - £179,350 Morton - £120,700 Hamilton - £73,970 (but this excludes the Challenge Cup or whatever it is called) Arbroath - £57,900 Cove - £3,000 If we can get £200k for Dipo then from the CFO's perspective this was an outstanding season and the prize money alone has just about made up for our smaller gate receipts than teams like Partick.