HMIP

No way can we seriously consider starting Bryden on Saturday. Think we’ll have little option but to push McKenzie up front. Guess it’ll depend on Dempsey’s fitness what happens beyond that.

We lined up with 2 defensive midfielders, no real width and one isolated striker up front. It just wasn’t a surprise at all that we never looked like scoring. For the umpteenth time this season we waited until we were a goal down before we attempted to be more progressive, but even then the substitutions were incoherent.. For all the criticism of Adeloye as a lone striker, it’s only taken Ashford 3 or 4 games to get sufficiently frustrated that he earned himself a straight red. Must be soul destroying spending your day chasing scraps and lost causes.

Don’t kid yourself. Kilmarnock should have had a penalty for Fjortoft’s handball and the same player had to take a red card to stop them running through on goal. Could easily have been 5 by halftime. Kilmarnock settled at half time and managed the game thereafter. The real test was how we responded to that horror show up at Arbroath, and there was absolutely nothing. Bullen has to take some blame for that with his awful set up. Moffat must be cutting about on a Zimmer frame if he genuinely has less to offer than a 17 year old who has looked completely out his depth on every showing I’ve seen and appears nowhere close to ready for first team football.

Other way about for me. Yep, what fight? The players disgraced themselves last Friday and you might have thought we’d have seen a reaction against Arbroath. Instead they mustered no shots at goal and conceded another goal from a near post corner.

I’m not feeling great about Saturday given we’ll probably have Bryden up front. Away trips to Queens and Dunfermline still to come as well. We’ll need to take big points from our 3 home games, which is worrying given Bullen has yet to conjure a home win (the Arbroath game doesn’t count).

Fair point. As a product of our youth system, Alan Forrest did a lot more for the club. Adams was a recent cult hero, but Malcolm Shotton was on another level. Probably should have had a swing at the manager’s job back in the mid 90s.

We’re in the shit now. You knew Uncle Ian would let us down.

Other than Alex Ferguson , which is an odd choice given he was a journeyman striker who was done by the time he came to Ayr, I’d happily have a table for everyone on the list!

I seem to remember a few Ayr fans saying we wouldn’t miss Ross Docherty. Unreal.

I’m impressed that Adeloye can be the scapegoat even when he is out injured.

Never in all my decades of watching Ayr have I watched the club blow so much smoke up one man’s arsehole as they have done with Bullen. The only comparison I can think of was back in the mid 90s when we were briefly taken in by Simon Stainrod’s swagger and fedora hat. I don’t think this is going to end any better for us. Looking at his tactics, team selection and particularly substitutions, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he is completely clueless. Doesn’t excuse the players right enough - after disgracing themselves last Friday, I was looking for a response today, so to produce such an insipid performance says a lot about them as a group. Next week looks a write off already given Morton’s improvement and the likelihood that we won’t have a forward line. That Accies were good enough to take 4 off Partick doesn’t bode well either. We are basically now relying on Dunfermline and/or Queens being worse than we are.

Bringing on a school wean who has never kicked a ball for the senior team and has never looked anything other than out of his depth in his appearances so far, is just one of many reasons to question Bullen’s increasingly incoherent decision making.

Take away that out of the blue win against Kilmarnock and Bullen has done absolutely nothing. We were probably lucky to hit Inverness and Raith at just the right time, because our performances outside of those 3 games have been simply awful.

Hard to tell how bad the tackle really was.

Hard to believe that Bullen is just standing there with his thumb up his arse.

Is McAdams contracted for next season? He really is pretty woeful at crosses.

How could you hate Sharples? He was absolute class. Think he got a career ending injury not long after leaving Ayr so probably didn’t fulfil his potential. Think we got decent money for him as well.

Some good players in the Ayr team that day. Cammy Duncan, John Traynor, Duncan George, Willie Jamieson, Paul Kinnard and John Sharples (who scored a stunning OG as I recall!).

Houston played in a much better team when he first signed, so maybe he just appeared to show up better and his performances over the last 2 seasons are more reflective of the real standard he’s at. That said, I do seem to remember him getting around the park a lot faster when he first arrived, but maybe that was just compared to Andy Geggan who’s legs had pretty much gone that year.

I see Bet365 have refunded me bet credits on my James Maxwell anytime to score bet, presumably because he was hooked after 20 minutes. You know it’s been a bad night when the bookies are taking pity on you.

Was speaking to a Killie fan at work today (who was surprisingly magnanimous, smug p***k) who expressed his own surprise that we took a man out the midfield and went “gung ho” as he put it. As others see us?

You must have the other half of my brain!

To recap, we were 3 down inside 15 minutes, we completely changed the shape of the team after 20 minutes and subbed off 2 players at the same time, neither of whom were particularly guilty of individual errors for the goals. Fjortoft was presumably thrown on to try and deal with Lafferty’s physicality (or for comedy value, I’m not sure which) and Dempsey was clearly put on to give us more legs in the middle of the park as they were running through us at will. If you can’t see that tale of woe as evidence of a malfunctioning setup, then I don’t know what to tell you. I presume that you are implying that last night was mainly down to “individual errors” - I personally think that’s a conceit that gets trotted out when we don’t want to admit the truth, which is that we were absolutely ragdolled.

Don’t really care if the fans are happy with the selection - this isn’t a committee system. It’s the manager’s responsibility to set the team up and we were an utter shambles. There was a lot more wrong last night than just individual errors, though that is a useful conclusion if you want to absolve Bullen of any responsibility. Kilmarnock were clearly looking to play to Lafferty’s physicality and get runners in behind - I don’t think we had the first idea how we planned to deal with that. As others have said, it looked like a classic case of “this team worked against an awful Raith side, so let’s just try that again”. Dempsey played 70 minutes without issue so there was clearly no reason why he couldn’t have started the game. After sacking 3 managers in less than a year, we can only hope that Bullen is the man going forward. But honestly, the level of completely unearned hype around the guy is ridiculous. The unlikely win at Rugby Park bought him a lot of goodwill, and rightly so, but the home performances since he took over have been woeful. Outplayed and outthought by Dougie Imrie’s Morton and Willie Gibson’s QOS in crunch relegation 6 pointers, a feeble capitulation against St Mirren in the cup and now a derby performance that I think most are agreed was the worst in living memory. The midfield 3 of Murdoch, Dempsey and McInroy looked like something we could build around, so hopefully we will see that return next week.

Don’t know what to make of Bullen. He’s clearly got bags of enthusiasm and there has been a clear improvement already in the recruitment of new players. On the other hand, there’s a tactical naïveté about him that has verged on ineptitude at times. Last night was extreme, but when you consider the dire performances against Queens and Morton as well as the early capitulation against St Mirren in the cup it didn’t come out of nowhere. The wins over Kilmarnock and Inverness were built on the midfield 3 of Dempsey, Murdoch and McInroy, so I guess we should build around that. Maybe Bullen just got carried away by the win against a Raith side that have been in full implosion mode for weeks.