FortescueFotheringhamSmyth

Have to say it's very rare to see a gamble of the size of the one taking place on Qarabag just now. OK, it's not the World Cup Final. Turnover will not be high. It doesn't take 5-figure bets to alter the market. I doubt it would take a 4-figure bet to alter the market. However, Qarabag were 13/10 yesterday evening. Aberdeen were 2/1. That's now shifted to a best 8/11 Qarabag, with some 4/1 about the Dons. One of the more exotic online firms is going 21/5. The Aberdeen price has doubled. That would suggest to many that things are happening in SE Asia. (They are not) Only £20,000 traded on Betfair but trade is getting brisk in the last 15 minutes and the Dons have been backed in that time: in to 5.1 just now, having been 5.5. Qarabag currently 1.92. It's not like the weather is a surprise.

Dan Childs in Racing Post preview today tips LASK -1 on handicap @ 29/20. Hard to argue against that. God alone knows why they've moved it to Klagenfurt. Must be UEFA-approved stadia closer to Linz than that. It'll mean few home fans. Probably wise to have no away fans. Many Austrians have a phobia about National Socialism - more so in Linz's state. Given the SNP's ideology, saltires might not go down too well there.

By most rational analyses, these are diddies. They might go close if they were in this season's Championship... if Killie had a lot of injuries. That's about the standard we're looking at. They needed extra time to best Connah's Quay Hammerthrowers in the CL qualifiers - exactly what you'd expect Pars, Jags, Caley or Raith to do, after 3 hours of frustration. They were respectable in both gsmes v. Sheriff Tiraspol, who look set for the CL groups after beating Dinamo Zagreb 3-0 in Tuesday's 1st leg. The win over Kairat Almaty was unexpected. As said above, they've lost their 1st two league games. Prior to the Kairat win, they'd only beaten ex-Yugoslav diddies and the Andorran hammerthrowers who played the Spoonburners last month... and Sainties, in their European debut. They're the usual deal over there: a club that puts the average "Right On!" Scot's outrage at Old Firm antics in perspective. Founded by a Soviet "businessman" 10 years ago, as a revival of a club that folded a decade or so earlier, but which had played feckin' miles from Yerevan... in a province partly occupied by Azerbaijan since the war that predictably erupted when the USSR collapsed. Despite playing near Azerbaijan in the east, that club was named Alashkert in honour of the town of Alashkert. That's now over the western border in Turkey, but it was an Armenian town until the Armenians were expelled in the war between Russia & Turkey... at about the time 4 lads walking through Kelvingrove Park decided to start a football team. During the recent flare-up, there were columns of these barstewards from both sides - mainly Azeris, but some Armenians - driving around Kensington in London, in convoys, blocking streets and tooting horns. (Both embassies are in Kensington, about half a mile apart... with the Israeli embassy and the resident gangs of angry Philistine demonstrators between them) The Caucuses & Balkans should be sealed off and allowed to get on with it!... and as for the massive new batch of trainee drivers from Kabul, due to arrive at the Uber Academy in London shortly... The lot of 'em should be hoyed out and replaced with people who are not terminal basketcases. Filipinos would do. That won't happen... unfortunately... ...but at least The Famous will hoy these c**ts out. This will be at least 4-0. No danger.

A man who could teach most modern soccer players about application on the football field... and in the classroom... and on stage & screen... ... and let's not start on his efforts in the field of "rights" and "justice"

Veteran tipster Steve Davies does the Racing Post preview. Recommends a punt on "Over 3.5 Goals" @ 15/8. Cannae mind who did the Racing & Football Outlook preview and I don't have my copy to hand, but they went for a Celtic win. I think it was "Hooray" Henry Hardwicke, who pens a virulently orthodox condemnation of "obscene" transfer fees and "undeserved" wages in a rant on pages 2 to 3.

Bogdan; Doherty, Ambrose, Fontaine, Booth: Brown, McGeouch, McGinn, Wotherspoon; Griffiths, Doyle. .... Would've been a lot easier 12 years or so ago.

Dublin on Friday night. Not changed since I lived there. The guy apologising for snotting him after realising he'd chinned the wrong fella is typical. The story isn't in the class of the time 30-odd years back that a female dining companion of Seb Coe had her bag snatched at a restaurant. Coe gave chase but the guy lost him! https://www.rte.ie/sport/other-sport/2021/0817/1241270-olympian-woolley-attack-could-have-been-much-worse/

Well, after a pleasant couple of lazy afternoons on the politics forum (What a mindless, venomously orthodox country this has become. Almost like an Old Firm fanzine in the 90s, but without the humour) I'm back on the serious sub-boards. AZ 67 Alkmaar. Celtic 11/10 or so for Wednesday night. That looks worth an almost serious bet. I'd prefer taking a shade of odds-on to qualify, but I can't see a market up on that as yet. As Willy says above, AZ have been pillaged over the summer. Three of their best players have fallen to the chequebooks of Les Grenouilles and will be gracing Ligue 1 this season. AZ can't complain about that. Their historic successes have been gained when they've pushed the boat out a wee bit further than was prudent, under 2nd-rate sugar daddies, then paid the price. Most notable triumph was the 1980/81 campaign. They won the Dutch league by 12 points (2 for a win back then) from Ajax, losing only 1 game & scoring 101 league goals. They beat Ajax in the cup final too. They were only denied a treble by a peak form Ipswich Town, who comfortably despatched them in the UEFA Cup final. AZ could only finish 3rd in defence of their title and had the bad luck to run into Liverpool early doors in the European Cup. After a 2-2 draw in Holland, it was also 2-2 at Anfield with 6 minutes left. Alan Hansen then scored one of the 14 goals he managed in his 13 seasons on Merseyside. That was the Ipswich side that narrowly lost the English title race to Aston Villa, who famously used only 14 players in 42 league matches. Ipswich played 66 games that season, having fair runs in the League Cup and FA Cup. They began their FA Cup run by knocking out Villa, who'd lost in round 2 of the League Cup. Burley, Wark, Brazil, Muhren, Thijssen, Butcher, Mariner & Ing-Ger-Lund skipper Mills would've played a fair few internationals too. Ipswich were a match for any team in Europe back then, though not for Fergie's Sheep, who beat them in the 1st round the following season. AZ's recent European record has merely been respectable. They lost to Dinamo Kiev in the Champions League qualifiers last term, before finishing 3rd in a Europa League group comprising Napoli, Real Sociedad & last week's slayers of the Spoonburners, Rijeka. In 19/20 they lost to Sainties opponents LASK. AZ may have finished one point adrift of PSV last spring, but that was a vastly different XI to the one that will take the field at Parkhead. They started last season slowly: 6 straight league draws and a 12-12 goal tally. They survived a mid-season drama when learning that coach Arne Slot was being tapped-up by Feyenoord. They fired him on the spot. Luckily for him, Slot did get the De Kuip gig. Anglo-Dutch career coach Pascal Jansen stepped up from number two and has kept the top job for this season. A highly regarded coach buggering off midseason is usually bad news for squad stability. Over the summer they've seen goalie Marco Bizot move to Brest for €5m. They haven't replaced him, deciding to go with experienced back-up Hobie Verhulst, who spent a few seasons as number #1 at Volendam and Go Ahead Eagles, two clubs who bounce between the top two divisions. Sander Westerveld's sprog is also on the books, but the son of the man who was once the UK's most expensive goalie is only 19 and not near the 1st XI. (The same goes for Ruud Gullit's son, Max, who's a number #5.) Tricky and dangerous wide midfielder Calvin Stengs has joined Nice, for a fee variously reported as being €10m or €15. Biggest loss will likely be spearhead Myron Boadu, who's gone to Monaco for €17m. AZ have bought the promising Greek "proper number #9" Vangelis Pavlidis from Willem II. He was a 2-goals-in-5 man over his two-&-a-half seasons there, which is a good return for a proper line-leading #9 at a club at Willem II's level. Pavlidis started on the bench in Saturday's season opener - a surprise 1-0 loss at Waalwijk. AZ are clearly not short of €€ for replacements, but nobody notable has yet arrived. Also on the bench on Saturday was skipper Teun Koopmeiners, who scored 15 goals from midfield last season. The queue to sign him seems long, with Arsenal reportedly amongst those interested. He seems certain to be up the road by the end of the month. It appears he was left out as coach Jansen thinks his mind won't be fully on the job. Vice-captain Owen Wijndal missed pre-season and Saturday's opener with a groin injury. His replacement at #3 on Saturday was Thijs Oosting, generally a midfielder, who was making his debut and whose only previous Eredivisie experience was while on loan at Waalwijk last season. AZ are generally a young side, though Bruno Martins Indi, who's not played for Holland since 2017, and expensive long-term Southampton flop Jordy Clasie should start on Wednesday. They are likely to start Pavlidis at #9, but fielded three much smaller forwards v. Waalwijk. Promising but raw kid Zakaria Aboukhlal, who represented Holland at most ages until his call-up by Morocco last winter; small, nippy, Swedish winger Jesper Karlsson, who bagged 11 goals last season and narrowly missed Sweden's Euro 2020 squad... and the interesting Icelandic wide-man Albert Gudmundsson. Albert is a 4th generation professional. His great-grandfather, also named Albert Gudmundsson, was Iceland's first professional player, before rising to the heights of Icelandic Finance Minister. He resigned his cabinet position after a tax fraud case, which was apt when you consider that he started his impressive football career at.... ehhhh.... Ibrox: playing a number of wartime games for Rangers while a student in Glasgow, before making a few amateur appearances with Arsenal, then going pro with AC Milan, RC Paris and the aforementioned Nice. If Pavlidis doesn't start, AZ may struggle to trouble Joe Hart... even through Celtic's current defence. Diminutive 17-year-old striker Ernest Poku came on with Pavlidis on Saturday, but AZ made no impression on Waalwijk. AZ had 72% possession and won the shot count 19-7 at Waalwijk. That got them sod all in a 1-0 defeat. Waalwijk finished just one point above the relegation play-off place in May, winning just 7 of their 34 league games. They were around 9/2 with the bookies to beat AZ. With AZ in something approaching disarray, anything better than 4/5 about Celtic and their ragged defence qualifying looks worth taking to me.

Massn-bassn-rassn-frassn spellchecker. There is one thing that should befall some folk at the Scottish football authorities that is traditionally carried out at dawn.

Silly question. 13 straight swerves in the Glasgow Cup SFs suggests it might have been partly pre-dawn. Maybe previous year's finalists straight to SFs and seeded. Was that ever policy? I've never heard that it was. I assume the other competition listed is the Merchants Cup. I've no idea of the exact format for that either.

Raith Rovers were apparently not awarded a single penalty kick in their Locke/Yogi relegation season. (I'm not sure how many pens Lewis Vaughan won for Dumbarton that spring.) So infeasible stats do occur in other categories. EPL stats from last term show almost exactly one penalty kick was awarded for every three games played - a 30+% increase on the 5-season average and more than double the 1990s tally in the English top flight. I doubt there was one spot-kick every three games in the Championship five seasons ago, but Raith's penalty-kick-free season is still remarkable.

Might have made more sense (£££) to keep Rangers away from Hibs and/or Hearts in those years, as Celtic were often shite.

I'd guess the number of Glesca juniors fans who reckon draws are rigged in favour of Pollok is high

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/scottish-cup-celtic-rangers-hot-21327618.amp The Daily Ranger from last year.

There must be something more effective than the UK Border Patrol keeping "Them" out.

Yet

Or perhaps God's a Presbyterian

...and the information on Cup draws has to be available somewhere. Likely in lots of places.

OK. I apologise, Gordon. Your initial post was informative, thoughtful and analytical. I was a mite too cynical. But you were aware of precisely where this thread would go. I don't believe in conspiracy theories. I had the benefit of going to the best school I could reasonably have attended. There were a lot of clever b*****ds there. The number of brats viewed as being more intelligent than me was terrifyingly small. Some of my schoolmates, unlike me, have used their education to achieve things. None currently riding high politically (Thank f**k!) but a few pre-eminent in their scientific field, prominent in business (or banking) and even the odd arty type. How far short of the level of intelligence and cunning required to pull off any of the common alleged conspiracies do I believe any of my ex-schoolmates to be? About as far shy as Brechin City are of the standard required to win the Champions League. Admittedly, rigging a cup draw isn't on a par with being the Elders of Zion, but none of those involved in cup draws attended my school (or, in all probability, any educational establishment in the same league) so I still don't buy it.

Witches, illuminati lizards, enemies of the people, phobes/ists, Yahweh/Allah, feng shui... G. K. Chesterton never actually said: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing; he'll believe in anything."... but it's an accurate summary of humanity's default mindset. The OP does have the intelligence to point out that there is almost a 4% chance of a club getting the home/away split that Rangers have fluked. With 42 SPFL clubs.... You do the math. 10 seasons and 50-odd draws is not a sufficiently large sample size from which to draw conclusions. It's as if I've wandered back onto Miggs.Net, where this type of thread is common. (Even more common than on Follow Follow) My fave was "Is Levein's "Natural Order" Comment Sectarian?"... which, to be fair, is the type of thread title I used to put up as a pisstake on Celtic & Rangers forums, but the thread starter and most respondents seemed sincere. "Is Kevin Clancy a Sticky?" & "Is Tom English a Jambo?" were other classics. There was a long period on the 1970s/80s where the Erse Cheeks avoided each other in a seemingly infeasible number of semi-final draws, and in the rounds prior to the SFs. I recall they then drew each other very early three times in quick succession. This isn't even a topic on which it's possible to have a rational debate. As with the list at the start of my post, those who "believe" in the phenomena do so in circumstances where there is almost no evidence to support their "belief." They will seize upon any sliver of information that supports their "belief" and dismiss any contrary argument. There is a dedicated section of this site for this type of conjecture. This thread should be in that section.

Taking a year to approve a vaccine while thousands died. Aye, phenomenal. There are sound scientific reasons why vaccines & medicines generally take several years before being approved for general use, as any flid ought to know. **See what I did there?**

Idle punt. Should leave the SPFL & League Cup well alone today. I note Dundee are in from 31/20 when I was toying with backing them last night to 13/10 now.

I dislike having bets carry over to Sunday, but the Saturday prices don't have much value. I used to have a bad habit of leaving "the change" in online accounts. If I had a return of £258.45, I'd draw out the £250. If the bookie had nothing I fancied for a few days, I'd get fed up looking at the £8.45 and stick it on a stupid mug bet. This was especially easy to do on Betfair. I no longer do that, but no funds in an account means no Livestream. I stuck £20 in Bet365 about a fortnight back, so I could watch something crap on their site. Not a bloody thing I've fancied since then that Bet365 have been best price on. I'm getting very itchy with the urge to throw the £20 at something. These bookies are cunning wee scrotes. I've the same views as everyone else. Montrose, Falkirk and the Arabs. Tempted by Alloa, but they're flaky... & I'm not sure Clyde's midweek cup loss to Founded July 2021 FC can be taken at face value.

Pisspoor to only score five on stats like these. As for Pars - 0 shots, 0 corners- they should've given Yogi a call.

Can't see Pars holding out for long enough to get the natives restless... ....unfortunately. Looking forward to wee Ben Crawford's matchday vlog on YouTube, assuming he's doing one. He seems to have kick started his excellent channel on there.