dunning1874

No judgement on Molotnikov as a player, but unless he can start at centre forward it's not a signing we should be making. The last thing this squad needs is another attacking midfielder/winger. We already have Garrity, Moffat, O'Halloran, Shaw, Lyall, Crawford and McKay who can cover one or both of those positions. It's the area of the park we should be shedding players from in order to strengthen other positions, not adding more.

If we got Todorov and one other I'd be fine with that, but either way we can't end up with only one.

While Brophy hasn't been great, our next in line options up front are Moffat, Garrity and O'Halloran. If we need to move someone else on to bring in a replacement for Adeloye then there's absolutely no sense in it being Brophy. We've got five wingers, seven central midfielders and one striker, moving the only natural centre forward at the club on in order to sign a striker and still be stuck with only one would be stupid. You do wonder if getting out of the only 2 year deal for a senior player would be a factor for the club, but then that makes it less likely he goes without a payoff in which case we're not even reinvesting his full wage into the team, whereas with players with 6 months left (Shaw) you could see another club (Raith) just taking over their contract.

Murray on Connolly leaving: https://www.greenocktelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/25791536.greenock-morton-goalkeeping-coach-jon-connelly-departs/ “With that one, it's just about also cutting our cloth accordingly and seeing what's best financially for the club” I'm taking from that that Connolly was well paid for a goalkeeping coach and we'll be replacing him with a cheaper one? You have to have a qualified goalkeeping coach, quite apart from how tinpot it would be not to it's a requirement for a bronze licence, so unless we want a points deduction then he needs replaced.

Right, this is an actual argument unlike LargsTON making up things that aren't true, but can you elaborate? What does having the numbers for it to work mean? Does it amount to 'our fanbase isn't big enough to raise enough money' or is it about having enough expertise in the support? I think both are genuine issues with fan ownership but I don't see them as guaranteeing it to fail. There's always the issue that if you have some unforeseen bit of capital expenditure - like the damage to the roof for example - a private owner who has enough wealth could dip into their pocket and cover it if they choose to whereas that's obviously harder to do in the case of fan ownership, particularly if the money raised by the fans is already flowing entirely into the club's budget like ours rather than being saved up for a rainy day. That's one challenge, however I don't see it as fatal and the private owner model has its own downside, both in that scenario and in budgeting in general. As we saw ourselves for 20 years, the private owner proclaiming their own benevolence in "putting money in" is often just writing themselves an IOU. At least when a fan owned club has to move money around to cover an unforeseen cost it doesn't result in debt: that potentially having an impact on the budget in other areas doesn't make it a worse thing than running at a 300K loss every year and putting a millstone of several million pounds of debt around the club's neck. Regardless of whether the club if fan owned, privately owned or a 50+1 close combination of the two, I want them to be sustainable and live within their means rather than going back to where we were in piling up a mountain of debt and just assuming it'll be fine. That the club started breaking even while improving on the park was a massive achievement of fan ownership and should be hugely celebrated (although we're still to see accounts for last season and this one to know whether that's another thing Laird has damaged). As it is, MCT put over 100K into the club each season and Dalrada put something in that is presumably more than the actual value of shirt and stadium sponsorship. That is a combination of the club owner and a private party topping up the budget over and above the every day income every club has from season tickets, matchdays, merchandise etc, without the debt associated with a private owner doing it the way the Raes did. Sure, it'd be better if that MCT income was coming from 2000 members rather than 1000 and we might have more money in the budget for being privately owned if that owner was willing to bankroll spending, but we'd be writing the club's death sentence if that was just going to be piled onto the club's books in soft loans. Either way the actual footballing income is the same due to the size of the support, so if you want a sustainable football club I don't see how the private owner is necessarily going to be better regardless of the size of the support.

This isn't having a difference of opinion, you are just factually incorrect. The support hasn't dwindled. Last season was our highest average attendance since 16/17. Numbers through the turnstiles have broadly stayed steady with where they were for the last 15 years. There is no decline. It hasn't happened, you made this up. You say we're going nowhere on the park and the downward cycle will inevitably continue, but we've been better on the park under fan ownership than we were under private ownership. That's a fact. Even if you charitably only start it from the 07/08 First Division and discount the several years of failing to get out of the third tier before that, our average league position over those 14 years under the Raes was 6.9 in the second tier, so between 6th & 7th but closer to 7th. In four seasons of fan ownership, it's been 5.75, so between 5th & 6th but closer to 6th. We have factually been better. You've decided a decline on the park must happen under fan ownership because you have a dogmatic position that fan ownership is always bad at every club in the world, and so decided it must be true about Morton when the opposite is actually the case. You made it up. It's entirely possible that some of that better performance on the park was down to luck with a manager overachieving and we'll go backwards without Imrie, get relegated and the attendances will go downhill as a result, but if it's all down to Imrie you'd then have to acknowledge that was a board under fan ownership doing something the Raes rarely did and getting a managerial appointment right. We'd also regularly found ourselves in relegation battles before fan ownership, having the most embarrassing season in the club's history in 13/14 and finishing 9th in the last season of private ownership, with people making the exact same point you are now that the owners had us in a cycle of decline that we couldn't escape without a change of ownership. People are welcome to advocate any ownership model they like, I'm not dogmatically attached to any model and see positives and negatives with all of them, unlike you who has a blanket position that fan ownership is a guaranteed failure so think you can get away with inventing reasons why it's bad rather than making a serious attempt to convince people. People will continue to object to your posts on fan ownership for as long as you fail to make an actual argument about why it's a bad thing and resort to making shit up instead.

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.