dunning1874

No, it isn't apparent to anyone, because it's something you've made up and have never once attempted to explain why it's the case. You've said it with no attempt to justify it, so it must be true and the rest of us are all idiots for not accepting it without question. The club have been unacceptably incompetent over the last couple of years, with an obvious deterioration through Laird's time as Chairman. The club were also unacceptably incompetent for 20 years of private ownership before that. The model of ownership isn't what matters, having competent people in the boardroom is and you can have a shambolic club or a well-run club regardless of the ownership model.

Queen's Park taking a pumping is good news, but Ross County getting a late winner at Airdrie is a nightmare; draw there was ideal. We need to win next week.

Arbroath statement on the crowd trouble.

In the absence of any update from the club we're left having to guess, but it's a safe assumption that when you've only named 6 subs out of a possible 9 and one of them is a 16 year old then all the first-team players missing are injured or otherwise unavailable. So for last night that was Moore, Comrie, Robertson, Taylor, Crawford and McKay, with Adeloye also still to be replaced. Moore and Comrie are the only two likely starters with Comrie and Ballantyne being much of a muchness anyway, but it's still a big hit to squad depth. You'd hope that just having more midfielders staying fit in the second half of the season gives us more options to change things, as we already have far too many bodies there to justify more signings. Blues and Gillespie both missed a month earlier in the season, last night was MacPherson's first time in the squad in over a month, Taylor missed two months, came back for one sub appearance and has now been out for another three months, only managing three league appearances so far. Crawford also has three league appearances, having been out for a month, returned for two sub appearances, been out for three months, returned for a sub appearance last week and then disappeared from the squad again last night. That's with Wilson only having missed one game through injury so far as well. With his injury history and age Crawford is probably done sadly, but hopefully with the rest having a run of fitness we'll have more options there, as having 7 central midfielders in the squad is mad as it is and the obviously needed signing is an alternative to Brophy.

The game should never have kicked off in those conditions, but everyone would have happily taken a point from tonight if offered it days ago without knowing that was what they'd have to play in, and several teams in this division will do worse than two points from Gayfield this season. You can't really read anything into the team as a whole or Murray where style of play is concerned when the game was such a farce, but to go behind in those circumstances and still come away with a point is a really good result. Terrific ball in from Moffat, good to see him getting the chance to play on his natural side so he can go outside a full back and whip a cross like that rather than always having to cut inside.

In Connolly's case I would be shocked if it wasn't him deciding to go himself, considering he's made extremely thinly veiled digs at the club on social media several times since Imrie left, that aren't dissimilar in tone to someone posting "2 many snakes in iss toon" on facebook after one glass of wine too many.

We had also conceded 12 more league goals and were 9 points worse off after 21 games of that season, because that team was much, much worse defensively than this one. This team being capable of grinding out draws where that one wasn't isn't a coincidence, it's because this defence regularly only concedes once. Across 21 league games they've conceded two or more in 5 games, all of them against the top four in the division. In 13/14 we'd conceded two or more in 14 of the first 21 games, with all but one side (Hamilton, ironically) managing it. We'd lost 5-1 to both the 9th placed and 7th placed teams. That side was utter dogshit and got hammered on a regular basis because of it. This side is flawed but actually don't concede many goals. The three sides below us have all conceded more. 10 of the 28 league goals conceded have been against St Johnstone, the best team in the league by a mile. Take out the three games with them and against the other sides in the league it's 18 conceded in 18 games, which is actually good: the performances against St Johnstone are an outlier whereas nothing in 13/14 was an outlier. Which brings us to this: This is simply complete bollocks, because Murray hasn't inherited a 13/14 or Gus MacPherson level mess. I've been critical of the defence throughout the season and thought it was an obvious place to upgrade, but there has been no indication throughout the season that the team was anywhere close to being bad enough defensively to deliver the performance and result they did on Saturday. That wasn't a manager being unable to polish a turd in failing to get an immediate improvement from a poor defence, that was a defence getting considerably worse than they've been before and turning in by a mile their worst performance of the season, with basic competence at set-pieces completely vanishing. When that happens immediately after a change of manager then the manager getting something horribly wrong is the blatantly obvious explanation for it. None of this means Murray is a dud who's incapable of fixing it and won't ultimately be a success despite the terrible start, but it's a self-evident fact that he made things even worse in his first game in charge and he needs to fix it quickly if we're not going to be in the bottom two by the end of the month.

I sincerely hope it is a one off, but if Murray indulges in the same collective delusion as much of this forum about it being nothing to do with him then it won't be. This team have played another 28 games this season, many of them against a higher standard of opposition, without ever being as bad defensively at set-pieces as they were on Saturday. This is an objective fact proven by the number of goals conceded from them. I'm sure he won't because his career as a whole suggests he's a good manager and I have confidence that he'll get it sorted out for this weekend, but if Murray shrugs his shoulders like everyone apparently thinks he should and agrees that there's fuck all he can do about it other than making new signings, because it's all the players and nothing to do with him, we'll be on the end of several more pumpings. We're not going to sign a whole new defence. Several of those players are still going to be playing regularly for the rest of the season and therefore he needs to do a much better job of organising them defensively than he did on Saturday, as even Billy Davies and Gary Miller managed despite being dreadful overall. This four places line also doesn't stand up. We're in different divisions. When we played Aberdeen earlier in the season we were five places from them, same as we are now from Partick. That doesn't make playing Aberdeen the same level of challenge as playing Partick. Had we beaten Aberdeen 4-0 that would have been one of the worst results in Aberdeen's history, just as losing to Inverness, Queen of the South or Hamilton (Stenhousemuir are a better team than two and possibly all three of them) would also have been for us. In the same way, losing 4-0 to Livingston would be a dreadful result for Aberdeen, as losing 4-0 to us would be for Partick, but not shooting extremely high up an all-time list for them because they're in the same division. Stenhousemuir are obviously a far better team than Stirling, but losing 4-0 is also considerably worse than drawing 2-2.

So we'd conceded 6 in 28 games, but then conceding 3 in 1 somehow isn't a massive and alarming regression? It is evidently much worse than in any other game this season. There is a massive difference between believing you a divine right to win a game and having an entirely reasonable expectation not to lose 4-0. I expected to lose and had it been 1-0 or 2-1, no one would be saying it was one of the worst results in our history. Losing in the manner we did is absolutely the worst result of the last decade at least, and one of the worst results ever.

Is the squad bad enough that we should be expecting to lose 4-0 to a League One team, with three goals from set-pieces? No one is saying Murray could reasonably be expected to implement a new style of play and have it click in two weeks/one game. That takes time. Overseeing basic organisation of defending set-pieces doesn't, that's just basic managerial competence which was completely lacking and has never been so bad at any other point this season, even when Davies or Miller were in charge. He will of course get time to fix the mess and rightly so, but the idea that he's blameless for Saturday because of the squad he's inherited when that squad have delivered by far their most disorganised and shambolic defensive performance of the season, when it was his responsibility to organise them, is blatantly fucking ridiculous. We have been shite all season, but never close to this bad.

Calling for Murray to take some responsibility rather than hiding behind frankly ridiculous excuses about the squad not being good enough when we've just lost 4-0 to a League One team is not calling for his head. No one is asking for him to be sacked, we're asking for him not to bury his head in the sand about how much his own failings contributed to this abject disaster, so that we don't see a repeat in the massive league games we have coming up in the relegation battle. A team conceding once from a set-piece can potentially be put down to individual errors from players that a management team can't legislate for. Any team conceding three goals from set-pieces in one game is evidently a terribly organised mess and that is always, always the manager's fault. There's a lengthy list of failures responsible for yesterday's result which aren't all down to him, but Ian Murray is obviously top of the list.

Yeah, regardless of who they are I expect the manager who had a fortnight with the squad to lower himself to bother his arse trying organise the defence. If we had Dylan Corr and Sonny Hart at centre back I would have been horrified at conceding three of the four goals. That was Ian Murray's fault and only Ian Murray's fault. I think there are heads being buried beneath literal mountains of sand here. The only debate about today is where it sits in the worst results in the club's history. It is unquestionably in the top five of the worst results in the entire 152 year history of this once proud football club. The serious contenders are today, Hamilton and Peterhead, and the man responsible for today opened with not even acknowledging that an apology might be necessary, but simply saying eh, ach it might less shit in a few weeks, nothing to do with his personal gross incompetence. I'm genuinely glad that we appointed Murray when the alternatives were clownshoes like Rankin and McPake, but he has absolutely humiliated himself and I expect a grovelling apology and massive improvement if he wants to see February. That was the kind of performance and result managers don't come back from, I think people are massively understating just how much of an abject disaster today was.

I'm a bit concerned that 10 hours have passed since that game kicked off ,and I have still not received several hundred pounds in my bank account with a personal apology from Jackson Longridge.

If we wanted to hear from ChatGPT and boil dolphins alive in the process of being served meaningless nonsense, we could ask it ourselves.

"We need help" Nah, fuck off. Help yourself. The squad is shite and should be better, yes, but your predecessor who built that flawed squad was getting more out of them because he's a good manager. Three of the four goals were set-pieces, that's on your lack of organisation. It's an abject failure of management.