RandomGuy. Posted June 7, 2020 Share Posted June 7, 2020 Just now, Lesser Is More said: I attended a Saints v Dundee match a few seasons back, a big crowd was in, well over 7000. One end of the ground was left unoccupied and it completely ruined the atmosphere. You've made that up, I'm afraid. Dundee always get the North Stand, and the Ormond hasnt been empty since becoming the "family stand" about 7 years ago. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lesser Is More Posted June 7, 2020 Share Posted June 7, 2020 26 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said: You've made that up, I'm afraid. Dundee always get the North Stand, and the Ormond hasnt been empty since becoming the "family stand" about 7 years ago. How could I make it up? I was there. I know I quoted a few seasons ago, misleading sorry. Both clubs were in the second tier, a poor match played on a bone dry pitch. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RandomGuy. Posted June 7, 2020 Share Posted June 7, 2020 5 minutes ago, Lesser Is More said: How could I make it up? I was there. I know I quoted a few seasons ago, misleading sorry. Both clubs were in the second tier, a poor match played on a bone dry pitch. Just the bit about it being "a few seasons back". St Johnstone haven't been in the second tier in 11 years. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadwell Dog Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 I remember when Saints moved to the new ground they were getting cracking crowds for the first couple of seasons then it all seemed to tail off and has never recovered even though they have been extremely successful. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Diamond Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 I seriously do not understand the OF's obsession with getting Colt Teams in the lower divisions of Scottish Football. The place for these teams is in the Scottish Premier Reserve League, but for whatever reason they refuse to participate in that league. For decades the reserves were the natural stepping stone to first team football and a platform for older players to step down to and give the youngsters some experience. Why do they think that they would get more experience playing against teams of the skill level of the 3rd division instead of equivalent Colt/fringe/older pros of the premier league? 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AL-FFC Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 20 minutes ago, Old Diamond said: I seriously do not understand the OF's obsession with getting Colt Teams in the lower divisions of Scottish Football. The place for these teams is in the Scottish Premier Reserve League, but for whatever reason they refuse to participate in that league. For decades the reserves were the natural stepping stone to first team football and a platform for older players to step down to and give the youngsters some experience. Why do they think that they would get more experience playing against teams of the skill level of the 3rd division instead of equivalent Colt/fringe/older pros of the premier league? Its probably because if they were to field an entire team of youths in the reserve league they would get booted up and down the park against players who are in the reserves for match fitness or fringe players with putting them on loan to lower league clubs some of the older experienced players would be able to talk them throug a game to bring them on. The annoying thing is before it was they cant go above league one now they want to restructure they have a colt team that would be able to get to the championship. What happens IF a colt team manages to win the championship ok they cant get promoted do you award the league trophy to the team that comes second or is the colt team still declared league champions. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bairn in Exile Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 20 minutes ago, Old Diamond said: I seriously do not understand the OF's obsession with getting Colt Teams in the lower divisions of Scottish Football. Really? Get the "Colts" in situ in the league set-up with the "promise" they can only go as high as the Championship, then the 2 "big" arse cheeks bugger off to England, Atlantic League or wherever, leaving the 2 colt teams behind and then get the rules changed so that they can progress up to the Premiership. B@$t@rd$. I really want to see Falkirk back up in the Championship through reconstruction but this is too high a price to pay, they can f*ck off. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bring Back Paddy Flannery Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 I’m not sure if it’s available online anywhere but Keith Jackson has an absolute stinker of an article in the Daily Record today. In short - Rangers proposal is genius and all the lower league clubs opposing it are irrelevant, contribute nothing to the SPFL and should become amateur football clubs. I nearly fucking punched the paper reading it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blue-Toon Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 I’m not sure if it’s available online anywhere but Keith Jackson has an absolute stinker of an article in the Daily Record today. In short - Rangers proposal is genius and all the lower league clubs opposing it are irrelevant, contribute nothing to the SPFL and should become amateur football clubs. I nearly fucking punched the paper reading it. https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/rangers-reconstruction-blueprint-radical-looks-22153526 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DA Baracus Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 20 hours ago, AL-FFC said: So what happens with cup games and with the format we have just now the proposal was no colt team would be allowed to progress past league 1 now we have the championship and what happens with cup games Celtic v rangers colts or celtic v celtic colts If it ever happened that B sides were allowed in to the leagues, they wouldn't be troubling the Championship. 16 hours ago, Nowhereman said: I know what you’re getting at OKI 3 but it’s a long time since Scottish football was democratically run. We just had a series of democratic votes. 1 hour ago, AL-FFC said: Its probably because if they were to field an entire team of youths in the reserve league they would get booted up and down the park against players who are in the reserves for match fitness or fringe players with putting them on loan to lower league clubs some of the older experienced players would be able to talk them throug a game to bring them on. The annoying thing is before it was they cant go above league one now they want to restructure they have a colt team that would be able to get to the championship. What happens IF a colt team manages to win the championship ok they cant get promoted do you award the league trophy to the team that comes second or is the colt team still declared league champions. There's no chance a B team would reach the Championship. They'd most likely be fighting for avoiding finishing bottom of League 2 most seasons. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SouthLanarkshireWhite Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 47 minutes ago, Bring Back Paddy Flannery said: I’m not sure if it’s available online anywhere but Keith Jackson has an absolute stinker of an article in the Daily Record today. In short - Rangers proposal is genius and all the lower league clubs opposing it are irrelevant, contribute nothing to the SPFL and should become amateur football clubs. I nearly fucking punched the paper reading it. Serious question - why do you buy it? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SouthLanarkshireWhite Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 9 minutes ago, DA Baracus said: If it ever happened that B sides were allowed in to the leagues, they wouldn't be troubling the Championship. We just had a series of democratic votes. There's no chance a B team would reach the Championship. They'd most likely be fighting for avoiding finishing bottom of League 2 most seasons. Currently. However, if Rangers and Celtic decided that getting them to the Championship was part of the strategy then they would find a way. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bring Back Paddy Flannery Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 1 minute ago, SouthLanarkshireWhite said: Serious question - why do you buy it? There’s a copy sitting in the break room in my work... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lesser Is More Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 14 hours ago, RandomGuy. said: Just the bit about it being "a few seasons back". St Johnstone haven't been in the second tier in 11 years. I must apologise for that, I passed the big 70 a few seasons back, so even anything pre- millenial seems recent. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ad Lib Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 Colts teams can get so far to f**k. I’d sooner Thistle were in the fourth tier of Scottish Football than Old Firm Colts are admitted to the pyramid. One of the few things still going for Scottish Football is that both the Old Firm and some young players see non-Old Firm clubs as a viable part of the player development pathway. As soon as you provide 36 or whatever weekend games a season for a Colts team you totally kill that off. The ambition for the country’s best will be even more concentrated with the Bigot Brothers, who can then offer more money and a much clearer route to progression for several times as many youth players. At the moment the Old Firm has to loan out its “not first team standard yet” youth players so that they don’t rot. This is an important counterweight against their ability financially to sweep up the overwhelming majority of youth talent. This advantages other clubs as they typically get subsidised loan arrangements for underdeveloped prospects. At the moment you also get a small number of players who don’t sign for the Old Firm at all. They are willing not to take a big pay check early in their career calculating that promising playing time will give them a chance to ply their trade in England. This means genuine talents like John McGinn, Andy Robertson, Robert Snodgrass, James McArthur, James McFadden etc. actually do play against the Old Firm in proper football and give other clubs a glimmer of a chance of delivering them a bloody nose. And when those players do move on, there is a proper market for those players rather than just two domestic bidders. So teams like Hamilton actually do get a million for a player instead of £250k or some risible training compensation. That money sustains and rewards non Old Firm youth set ups that are run well. Colts strangles that nascent alternative. The Old Firm will loan out fewer youths, release fewer youths surplus to requirements, and far more easily reap the financial rewards of discovered talent to the exclusion of other Scottish clubs. Even if you put an age limit on their Colts you are at best encouraging more players to be released in their mid 20s from the Old Firm instead of in their late teens. That’s bad for their development. If Clubs are drawn in by this promise of four years of paltry admission fees they are total mugs. We know fine well that money is just going to be spent on signing an extra journeyman in most cases and will not in fact support grass roots or youth development. Get it in the fucking sea where it belongs. 12 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RiG Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 (edited) 4 hours ago, Blue-Toon said: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/rangers-reconstruction-blueprint-radical-looks-22153526 Some of my favourite parts... Quote Not only would it correct all the wrongs which Covid-19 has dumped on our doorstep but it would also see the Old Firm launch B teams into the lowest tier. Colt teams will correct the wrongs of the coronavirus?! Quote So it is indeed a great pity that it will almost certainly be suffocated by the self interest of the perennial hangers-on who clog up the pyramid without ever contributing anything of substance to it. If you believe this then adding in teams who literally cannot progress beyond a certain tier in the league will only exacerbate the problem? Quote The most talented and pampered youngsters from the academies of Lennoxtown and Auchenhowie would also be fast-tracked from the sterile, cotton wool environment of pro-youth football straight into the real, gritty world of the professional game. This can literally happen right now. No need to reduce the lower tiers of Scottish football to nothing more than a glorified reserve league. Quote In the future, other top flight clubs would also be able to place colts sides into the pyramid, either in the Highland or Lowland League, and make men of their best young boys. There you go diddies, shut up and eat your cereal. Time for the top flight clubs to take over. The rest of you basically don't matter and your leagues will be turned into a reserve competition for the top tier teams. Quote It has the potential to be a game changer in the development of the country’s most talented teenagers and it could offer a glimpse of a better future for our national team. After 22 years kicking around in the international wilderness, it’s surely about time our game attempts to break outside of the same old box which has kept it caged in and stifled for so long. Why do people seem to think that Colt teams playing against a bunch of lower league sides will suddenly turn them into world beaters? Colt teams are seen as some kind of silver bullet to fix all the problems that the national team has but I see now evidence for this. How about we bring our coaching standards up to scratch and improve facilities for kids to play football instead? Quote There’s also a fundamental sense of fairness underpinning this Rangers proposal as it would spare Hearts and Partick Thistle from dropping down the divisions while also rewarding Kelty and Brora for winning the Lowland and Highland Leagues. And the team(s) that don't get promoted? Quote In fact, it’s difficult to find a single good reason for not backing the Ibrox club on this one, so difficult that even Celtic are on their side, but that doesn’t mean it will win the votes of those clubs who feel most threatened by change, the community clubs who aspire to do little more than exist. These are the clubs Gordon Strachan would like to see pushed to one side, perhaps into amateur status, to help streamline the professional set-up and create a fit-for-purpose elite. There’s much to be said too for Strachan’s vision of what a revolution might look like but such a huge, widespread cull could only be forced through by a breakaway from the SPFL and the creation of an entirely new league. Possibly the cuntiest paragraphs in this piece of drivel. Do we ever hear the top teams in England bemoaning York City for any lack of success the national team experiences? I had to stop reading after that before I threw my monitor out the window. Edited June 8, 2020 by RiG 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
harry94 Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 6 minutes ago, Ad Lib said: Colts teams can get so far to f**k. I’d sooner Thistle were in the fourth tier of Scottish Football than Old Firm Colts are admitted to the pyramid. One of the few things still going for Scottish Football is that both the Old Firm and some young players see non-Old Firm clubs as a viable part of the player development pathway. As soon as you provide 36 or whatever weekend games a season for a Colts team you totally kill that off. The ambition for the country’s best will be even more concentrated with the Bigot Brothers, who can then offer more money and a much clearer route to progression for several times as many youth players. At the moment the Old Firm has to loan out its “not first team standard yet” youth players so that they don’t rot. This is an important counterweight against their ability financially to sweep up the overwhelming majority of youth talent. This advantages other clubs as they typically get subsidised loan arrangements for underdeveloped prospects. At the moment you also get a small number of players who don’t sign for the Old Firm at all. They are willing not to take a big pay check early in their career calculating that promising playing time will give them a chance to ply their trade in England. This means genuine talents like John McGinn, Andy Robertson, Robert Snodgrass, James McArthur, James McFadden etc. actually do play against the Old Firm in proper football and give other clubs a glimmer of a chance of delivering them a bloody nose. And when those players do move on, there is a proper market for those players rather than just two domestic bidders. So teams like Hamilton actually do get a million for a player instead of £250k or some risible training compensation. That money sustains and rewards non Old Firm youth set ups that are run well. Colts strangles that nascent alternative. The Old Firm will loan out fewer youths, release fewer youths surplus to requirements, and far more easily reap the financial rewards of discovered talent to the exclusion of other Scottish clubs. Even if you put an age limit on their Colts you are at best encouraging more players to be released in their mid 20s from the Old Firm instead of in their late teens. That’s bad for their development. If Clubs are drawn in by this promise of four years of paltry admission fees they are total mugs. We know fine well that money is just going to be spent on signing an extra journeyman in most cases and will not in fact support grass roots or youth development. Get it in the fucking sea where it belongs. In all honesty, I don't really think it would change the market dynamics that much. The OF have a large number of players in their reserves, it's really not as easy to sort out loans for all of them . I guess you could argue it may be a tad more attractive for the prestige of playing for Celtic B or whatever to influence their pulling power but that's already near infinite already, as much as we get the 'gid young player learning his trade' talk whenever a player thrives elsewhere away from the OF, it's very rarely the case that they've actively picked a non OF club intentionally. You aren't increasing their income by anything that couldn't be considered a rounding error either so I also don't see that sparking a huge recruitment drive. Don't get me wrong, throwing this OF exclusive arrangement into the current small national set-up right now is lunacy and a really terrible idea at a terrible time which has been well covered but I think if we actually had a set-up that could support the full-time clubs fielding sides further down the set-up without completely destroying teams fixture calendars (i.e. a firm limit on no of colt teams v relative league size), there could be reasonable benefits reaped from it. In Spain, they have a third tier of 100 teams (as of next season) and well defined geographical territories. We've had this fragmentation with the juniors in this country which is finally eroding but as much as people scream the mantra 'too many teams in Scotland', we don't actually have that big of a national pyramid (Norway for example have 144 teams down to level 4). I don't know if we can ever get to a system where this can be done in a way that people can live with but we do know that renaming the u20 league back to being a reserve league (and a couple of practically minor rule changes) hasn't dramatically changed the competitive element of second string football and unless we're going to rewrite the loan system to fundamentally change how part-time teams recruit (making Celtic B = Stenhousemuir), I'm not really sure where we go. Maybe another path is to require ringfenced funding for reserve football and some further incentives to compete more seriously but obviously now is not a good time for that either! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DA Baracus Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 4 minutes ago, harry94 said: Don't get me wrong, throwing this OF exclusive arrangement into the current small national set-up right now is lunacy and a really terrible idea at a terrible time which has been well covered but I think if we actually had a set-up that could support the full-time clubs fielding sides further down the set-up without completely destroying teams fixture calendars (i.e. a firm limit on no of colt teams v relative league size), there could be reasonable benefits reaped from it What benefits? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Moonster Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 f**k off, harry. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bullyweehutch Posted June 8, 2020 Share Posted June 8, 2020 I'd soon rather be playing in the west of scotland league than having colts in the pyramid 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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