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TRVMP

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TRVMP last won the day on March 12

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About TRVMP

  • Birthday 06/14/1946

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    DOUGIE'S AT THE WHEEL (again)

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  1. It's easier than you'd think. I still jump off the couch when Scotland score - far moreso than I do when the USA score. And Scotland, being home, is always the place I'll have in the back of my mind for comparisons. But I'm an American now, I am integrated into this society, and every time I go back to visit everything feels a little different. This is natural: I spend maybe 10-14 days a year in Scotland and of course it's going to change. But I'm growing apart from it at the same time I grow into my life here in the US. I don't think I'll ever stop supporting the national team, and in that sense I fail the cricket test, but in all other senses I regard myself as American first and Scottish second.
  2. Plan B is we bring COVID back and get the season curtailed.
  3. I actually have some sympathy with this. It can't be easy being that age, having trained part time and in youth football, and then one day being judged in the exact same way as experienced pros. Not all youngsters could handle that. However, he could perhaps recall his own attitude and demeanor at the time. He wasn't exactly a paragon of Corinthian sport himself.
  4. Two wins, two draws and six losses for Sir Gav so far as The Swins (sub: check nickname) struggle in League Two but look safe from the drop. Sutton United are adrift in 24th and it's a battle between Colchester and failed clublet "Forest Green Rovers" to avoid 23rd.
  5. Gordon Ritchie has stood down from the GMFC board. After a bit of a rocky start I think he was integral to our recent successes as a club. Best wishes to him going forward. His replacement: "In view of Gordon's resignation and as the MCT Articles of Association state there should be a majority of MCT representatives on the club board, the board of MCT have unanimously voted to put forward existing GMFC Director, Michael Harkins, as their new representative, with Graham Barr and Sam Robinson already in place as MCT representatives. Michael has been an MCT member since the beginning and was involved in the leadership team in the build up to community ownership. Although he was appointed by the club board for his financal knowledge, he is a very suitable, and welcome, candidate to be proposed as an MCT representative." Harkins was appointed as Finance Director and didn't come on the board via MCT, but as this says, he was a member from the start.
  6. In case you missed it, Hearts are third in the Premiership, beat the champions last weekend, have in their possession the country's top goalscorer (whom we managed very well), and while we did indeed have a positive spell at the start of the second period, that was game management on their part, knowing they had reinforcements for the closing stages when we would - without any bench options - inevitably tire. Their goal was a counterattack and if you go all-out after that there's only going to be one ending: they throw people forward to catch the out-balls and you're screwed. It's just nasty to say Imrie doesn't trust the guys he's signed or whom he chooses to put on the bench. Again, this is the third-best team in the country. He's set our guys - who are a mix of good Championship players, former top flight players at the end of their careers, and youths - out with a plan, and throwing warm bodies at a plan for the sake of doing so is bad for all concerned. With no forwards on the bench, whom would you have put on with five minutes to go to hold the ball up against Sibbick and whoever the other one was at center-back? Was it: Jack Bearne, a winger Lewis McGrattan, a winger and midfielder Michael Garrity, a midfielder (and a diminutive one at that) or Sam Murdoch, a goalkeeper? Remember, everyone was saying Broadfoot was done since he was playing at LL level, and Imrie has - with some admitted road bumps along the way - got both him and Power playing well. Shankland was left in no doubt whom he was up against tonight and said as much in his post-match interview. Will Broadfoot get any recognition for that - again, Shankland is the best striker in the country right now, and will probably go to the Euros? Or will he just get slated for not scoring a last-minute equalizer? In a game where we'd been on the back foot for the majority, except early in the second half, Broadfoot did an admirable job keeping them to relatively few open chances. He deserves credit for this - and so does Imrie for signing and playing him! Long story short: if Imrie didn't trust Bearne he wouldn't be here, and if he didn't trust McGrattan and Garrity they wouldn't be getting minutes at all. Instead Bearne was signed and the latter two have played plenty, considering their ages. McGrattan has appeared in the vast majority of games this season, and Garrity (two years younger) is being carefully bedded in. They're getting an appropriate amount of football for the time in their careers and this is particularly true when you're up against, again, the third-best team in the country and a legendary Scottish goalkeeper who despite his age deserves to go to the Euros this summer. Leaving aside certain attention-seeking fuds (I do not count you as one of these) there really does seem to be this idea that Imrie's somehow throwing away wins by refusing to "trust" young players. It's absolutely idiotic. What Imrie knows, as a guy who came relatively late to the senior game, is that sometimes experience is what's needed. Just look at Queen's Park: they thought they could play a bunch of youngsters and have them play it out from the back, and that ended up with relegation form. Now they have a couple of old heads and they look fine, and the young players they have will be better for the experience. It's just not the case that you can go up against Hearts and throw the kids at them and come away with a better outcome than we had tonight, and people need to stop acting as though Imrie's sandbagging us by refusing to make Logan O'Boy captain. tl;dr: Scottish fans' fetish for putting the kids on is stupid. It's not borne out by the stats or simply by facing the right way at games. Imrie did nothing wrong. We held out own against a team that will send at the very least two players to the Euros in summer and will play in Europe next year, and we did it without our most vital player. There is absolutely zero scope to criticize Imrie for this game and everyone who does so should be hanged in real life.
  7. Strapp was indeed immense and that's despite them throwing the kitchen sink at him. Fair play, he's made some comeback from being without a club. A bottom-six top flight team could do worse than take a chance on him.
  8. It's been a gallant effort but can't see us coming back from that.
  9. I'm not jinxing it, I'm pointing it out because of our thin bench: there are no replays anymore in the Scottish Cup so it needs to be kept in mind before making any subs that there are 30 minutes of ET to contend with if it's 0-0 at the end.
  10. Not impressed by Hearts at all and Lewis Strapp is bearing the brunt of it. That's four or five times now they've hacked or shoved him.
  11. Fair point, I was just guessing that the "people in the ground" was the justification.
  12. I'm guessing. I believe it to be a combination of 'ealf 'n' safety gone mad and probably politically correctness gone mad as well.
  13. If I ran a stewarding company I would also insist on an "all or nothing" approach - either my company is given full latitude to interpret the rules in real-time as we see fit, or we don't do the job. In this sense, the stewards having final say without having to radio in to the directors' box for approval is the correct thing to do. I would also ensure, however, that the line manager on duty that day didn't so disgust the regular customers - many of whom either have a direct line to that directors' box or are indeed by equity a part of that same directors' box - that they would give a second's thought to us, much less want us replaced. I would instead decline to shit on my own doorstep, something seemingly above the people under contract this season. Regarding getting in late, however, I believe their hands are largely tied: as absurd as it may be, if you report a certain percentage of capacity at a certain time it's not wise to go above it, even if it's one person in an ocean of free terracing (hence on all-ticket days the fact you can't move between Sinclair Street and the Cowshed.) But even if that's an unavoidable circumstance, there are ways and means of communicating that to the fans. A single person or family showing up late is hardly going to cause any trouble; there's no reason to be anything other than sympathetic to them. Coming out all guns blazing against peaceful, regular fans while ignoring actual disorder is exactly how you get people not to take you seriously; for that reason, if no other, if I was on the GMFC board I would be giving serious scrutiny to the stewardship contract ahead of the 2024-25 season. It's one thing to say "OK, there's some arseholes on staff, but the fans will get over it and come back" - it's quite another to say "OK, the stewards are sending mixed messages and going after easy targets, and fans are noticing they're nowhere to be seen when there's some actual rule breaches going on - it would just take one dodgy incident in a Renfrewshire derby for this to go south very quickly."
  14. Marginally better than the last game but significant improvement needed.
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