rgreig

I believe that the home nations apply their own criteria on top which is basically the "granny rule" - i.e. you need to have a relative up to a grandparent who was born in the country. You are right though, many international teams do follow the FIFA rule and do not apply additional ancestry requirements. For example, I believe Steve Mandanda (French goalkeeper) who moved to France from Zaire as a child is an example but there are many others.

I did think at the time that Jemson was one of the most naturally talented players we had signed. It was a pity he could not be bothered once he had a contract. Would love to know what he thought of his time at Ayr - would not be surprised if he thought Dalziel was a clown. Neil Tarrant was another of that era that I thought never came close to fulfilling his potential. I remember he scored a great goal against Partick in the Scottish Cup to seal our place in the semi final I think it was.

Can Bullen not play Bangala at CB (or indeed any other position) in a reserve match to see how he performs there? Why use what could be a very important cup tie - in the sense of future revenue depending on who we get if we beat Pollok - to see how he does?

The only time he scored a decent number of goals in his career was when he played in the National League South in England. At Crawley he got 3 goals and 2 assists in 29 appearances and he has 2 goals and 4 assists in 31 appearances with us. Can't fault his effort or work-rate but he is simply not good enough. I would always start Young ahead of him.

Yes - 14 days after the sixth (not fifth) yellow card. Murdoch only has 5 bookings so need another one to be suspended.

I don't know if I'm underestimating Hamilton but since Mullin offers so much going forward I would only play him at RB if there was really no other option. How likely is Chalmers to be fit?

Unreal. The SPFL match centre (matchcentre.spfl.co.uk) works fine. It's pixellot but the stream quality is otherwise excellent.

That Annan wall was possibly the worst I have ever seen. No idea what they were setting up to protect (and nor did they obviously).

It was so frustrating, everyone in the stadium knew at that point the game was over. I don't mind bringing on JML but Ashford and McKenzie should only ever play if we are utterly desperate. Cove number 7 looked a good player but we should have converted more of our chances.

Very true, but he went on to have a far more successful career than Hurst.

Perhaps Gary Teale?

Yes, I saw them being filmed (I wondered if it was a vlogger who goes round the grounds) - it wasn't on a phone but a mirrorless camera with no tripod (!). I thought the person did well to be honest and I enjoyed watching the goals back. I have never spoken to any of the people involved in AUMedia but I think it's fairly evident that there are some big egos in there - certainly far bigger than their technical abilities.

I actually didn't think they were that bad. They created quite a few chances. We looked strong in defence generally, and we took our chances unlike last week. If we play like that against one of the poorer teams in the division we'll run riot.

Yes, was really disappointed with him when he came on. Definitely won't be in danger of starting any time soon. I really didn't think Queen's Park were too bad at all - they kept going and created quite a few chances. The difference was that their defence was quite soft (resembled ours last season) and we for once took our chances. I don't know how much Chalmers is costing us but he is a great signing. Queen's Park will play worse and win.

I had a look at the business support scheme (Energy Bill Relief Scheme: help for businesses and other non-domestic customers - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)) and it appears that small business users should expect to get a discount of around 40% but it does depend on the specific contract they are on.

I asked the same question but since nobody replied I did some research. This was the best page I found - How Much Does it Cost to Run Football Flood lights - TACHYON Light. Obviously it does depend on the type of bulb used and the price per kwh that the club pays (given that the price cap doesn't apply to businesses we cannot assume the domestic cap of 34p per kWh). Basically using the type of bulb in that link (which I gather is a more efficient LED type rather than metal halide) it would be about 18 quid an hour to produce the required lux. Let's say ours are super inefficient or we pay a lot more - make that 40 quid an hour. 5 hours (?) on a matchday would be 200 quid worst case and possibly a lot less. I sanity checked this by looking at other posts (all from before the energy crisis) which all seemed to indicate the energy usage of floodlights wasn't really too bad in the grand scheme of things. Happy to be corrected by people who actually know what they are talking about though!

Does anyone know roughly how much it costs to run the floodlights for a match? How much electricity (kWh) do they actually use? I agree that 3pm is essentially an arbitrary time but the point about children's activities being a challenge for some people with a 12:45 KO is a good one - I know that it would make it quite tight for me getting down from Glasgow. Why 12:45 and not 1pm? Not enough daylight at the end of the match in December? The fact that streaming is being mentioned shows how utterly dumb the streaming restriction is, but also that clubs have found it to be a useful additional revenue stream. Surely this can be resolved properly for next season, irrespective of the KO time?

Completely agree. I have said on here for months that Ashford is just not good enough and hopefully it is now obvious that we have far better alternatives in the squad. Today was really frustrating - we will play far worse and win - but looking at the positives our subs in spells looked good and staked a claim for the starting eleven which will help.

Yes, completely agree. He was awful particularly in the second half. And as for the penalties, it was as if he wasn't even trying to save them. I wondered if he had taken a knock which impacted his ability to get down quickly but on reflection I think he was always that bad with penalties. I thought we had decent spells in the first half, particularly in the lead up to the equaliser. But in the second half we were really poor and I didn't think we deserved to go through on the overall balance of play. Mullin is good and I think will become a starter in the league. For the ref's performance, I didn't see the Quitongo incident so can't comment on it but I thought the Baird red was ridiculous and the second yellow for Smith looked harsh.

Interesting re. the costs of running Pixellot. How expensive is it if clubs do use it - you say it is expensive but how many streams would you need to sell to break even with it? I personally found the quality OK (the basics like frame rate and resolution were fine which Ayr really struggled with on their own offering) and it certainly removes the barrier you rightly highlight about finding suitably qualified people to run a more sophisticated service. Clearly extrapolating behaviour from observations during the pandemic has been shown to be difficult - see for example the VCs who pumped cash into food delivery startups ("reimagining salad leaf delivery") and now find that market dying. But I would challenge that we could not put together models for different scenarios particularly given that the last quarter of the season was definitely getting back to normal. I am amazed that despite signing up to every single streaming service in the championship last season I have not had one single request from any of those services asking about my experience with it, how I would consider using it in future etc. As someone who builds digital services for banking for a living this is the most basic thing we do - make changes, observe behaviour and speak to users about their expectations and needs. I would position it as an opportunity to attract a different set of fans particularly away fans. Some people might switch from in-person attendance but you also have the opportunity to attract some people who otherwise would never attend. I agree that research is required to assess how that would play out in the medium term - but in my view it is worth exploring unless the cost profile right now is prohibitive.

Presumably given the experience over the last year clubs have enough data to make an estimate of the financial benefit (or loss)? And that should then be able to drive a decision about whether to continue with it - as you say, nobody is forcing a club to run a streaming service. I found it very valuable for away games, and also any midweek fixtures which I can never attend (home or away) due to work commitments. I probably saw more games live last season than I have done for 20 years. In any case, since the decision was made to install Pixellot the economic case is slightly different since the cost of running that isn't removed by stopping the streaming service. Clubs have generally chosen to run a service in addition to pixellot but to be honest I would be fine with pixellot if it saved the club money overall.

I had never looked at the details of the process for footballers but, inspired by your post, I decided to take a look. The process has changed following Brexit so it isn't exactly the same as the tier 2/tier 5 process in pre-Brexit times. This article is one of the better ones that I found that describes some of the changes in more detail: Engage PR | Player endorsement: A world of opportunity for Scottish football I presume (but would be interesting if we could get it confirmed) the club has actually now ended up in a situation not unlike the one mentioned in the above article for Ramirez whom Aberdeen signed, where he didn't reach the automatic points total and needed to go to an exception panel. The author of the above article calculated Ramirez had 10 points, which is well below the magic 15 needed. I haven't managed to find how the Slovakian league ranks in this process but can't imagine Bangala's team being relegated would have helped his points total either. Edit to add: I eventually found this comprehensive document on the SFA site which I think is current: the-scottish-fa-2020-21-gbe-mens-criteria.pdf (scottishfa.co.uk). The Slovakian league seems to be the lowest banding (6) which means I don't think Bangala will end up with many points at all unless I am missing something very fundamental.

I don't want to get into any of the politics but I did say on this forum that based on my experience (I have hired a large number of skilled workers this year) it takes around 3 months. I am not hiring footballers so maybe there are some differences but I would not expect a big delta on that timeline. Given that Bangala was announced on 11 June I would therefore be penciling in late August to early September. But as I say I have not hired footballers nor do I know anything about his circumstances. I think the club could have managed expectations better but perhaps they naively believed the time lines quoted by the home office. But as I said earlier this is not something the club can control. Also if you are hiring someone on a two year deal I doubt you would change that decision based on a delay of 4 to 6 weeks.

I hate to agree with you but you have a point you go around Killie and you see plenty of folk in killie colours it's rare to see see in Ayr, it may be due to Killie being in the top league for 30 years and wining a cup of two but for decades it seams that a large proportion of the town don't give a care about the football club Smith and Mathie to there credit are trying to change that with the community engagement but that's not going to change overnight. It's hard to argue that our season ticket sales are anything other than poor. Maybe Kilmarnock isn't a great comparison because they have been in the top flight for so long but surely we should be aiming for the same number sold as Raith or Falkirk (who have been garbage for some time now). I don't know what percentage of our season tickets are concessions, but if you assume 70% are full price then another 3000 season tickets would bring in nearly 800k which would get close to doubling our player budget. Even another 1000 would bring in 250k which after deducting VAT is still a solid increase. Whatever you think of the manager, being able to afford better players isn't going to make us worse.

I don't think any reasonable person could disagree that our squad is currently weaker than last season. The variable I don't know is how much wages have changed year on year in football? Are we able to assemble a decent squad with the budget we have? If it is true that we have lost out on several targets is that because we were naive or was it that competition increased wages more rapidly than we expected?