vikingTON

Still better than last season, when we got de facto knocked out of the League Cup on Glasgow Fair Saturday, and then papped out of the other two cups before the Advent calendars were cracked open. An unsurpassed nadir of interest in GMFC. To get our frankly inevitable 45 points in the league and ending up with Murray to replace Imrie are pretty good outcomes for GMFC as a club given all the turnover this season- we could easily have got another Johansson level clown instead - but I agree that we could have done with a cup campaign to build enthusiasm too. Which is why I once again return to that truly risible day at Ochilview, when we simply failed to perform the basics of a professional football team, as dealt with in every game since. With one further win after Ochilview, there would be a wide-open quarter and semi final path that we could have been involved in. One plus though is that the team under Murray is playing football to attack and score goals at the moment, as opposed to the possession for possession sake nonsense that Imrie adopted too often in his last 18 months.

That can all be the case, yet we still chose to start Gillespie for the third game in a row - which we wouldn't have considered even two years ago - rather than just moving Wilson into his natural position and giving Owens a game at the back instead. It is equally unsurprising that giving three starts to the wide players results in a perfectly hit and miss (W1 D1 L1) return. We have done very well to deal with the Storer and Moore absences in particular - given how key they have been to defensive solidity all season long - but the combination of the last half hour's team management on Tuesday and today's starting lineup was self inflicted and almost guaranteed a stinker today.

There is no football team in the country that has close to a fully fit and/or eligible squad in late February, and our most recent Dalrada investment seems to have been largely spent on padding out the squad depth. So we can have no excuse about a handful of absences right now - we're only as much affected as nine other teams in the division.

The very little squad rotation is key. We were always going to be at a disadvantage for this game (though at an advantage next week), and were 2-0 up against ten men on Tuesday night. Yet we ran the first picks into the ground, played like dogshit for the last half hour on Tuesday night anyway, and somehow expect that prior 180 minutes not to have consequences. Our failure to manage the game properly on Tuesday set this result up. Despite the tears and snotters from some though, this result only underlines the reality of an utterly predictable, humdrum 7th place finish.

More positives than negatives, but there were a couple of those too. 1) Our performance for the first hour was very good - aggressive in getting the ball and in using to attack Dunfermline with purpose and not a little bit of good skill and link up play too, including for the first goal. 2) The full-backs were excellent and have been the stand out performers since Murray's arrival. We made Dunfermline look very, very poor - which off the back of a similar gulf in performance shown against Ross County (as well as a draw in between) is the sign of an effective team. 3) A further positive is that both the new keeper and new centre back have settled in very well - two potential problem areas with absence, that we have covered very effectively. Thank fuck we won't be seeing Dylan fucking Corr haunting the terraces of Cappielow any time soon. The final 25 minutes or so showed an amateurish level of game management though, that will come back to bite us if it is not addressed. But for a very soft second penalty award (of course we could and should have been a few goals further ahead before that...). we would have been hanging on for grim life - and played like we actually were against ten men. 1) The lack of composure with the ball was an issue that could have been sorted by the players on the park. Gillespie and McPherson have several hundred games of experience between them - one of them has to come short and demand the ball gets played to them, instead of some ludicrously ambitious defence-splitting pass, or aimless punt towards a double marked Main) coughing up possession instead. I thought Gillespie did very well in marshalling our use of the ball in the Ross County game - perhaps the penalty miss spooked him last night, but the same task was required. 2) I would also liked to have seen more from Murray in bringing fresh legs off the bench - not least with an eye on Saturday's game too. Shaw is clearly not first choice under the new regime which is fullly justified, but he doesn't need to be in order to do a job for 25 minutes last night - bringing fresh legs to an attack/wide areas where the energy predictably diminished after the hour. Comrie could have been brought on simply to cover the right wing in front of Ballantyne - or (fitness allowing), I'd like to have seen Crawford given time as well. O'Halloran made the team worse last night quite frankly.

Quite why we shouldn't play Brophy and Main, yet can shoehorn O'Halloran into the team instead is a mystery. It's much more logical to ditch the latter in order to provide a shape that suits a front two partnership instead.

We've literally just had a group whose promises (e.g. innovative energy efficiency - upon entry to GMFC) and pledges to be around for a long time have dissolved into nothing. The key for me in judging risk is the degree to which our operating budget is tied to external funding - by chucking two year deals at players etc. If it is a lesser degree, then we can ruthlessly adjust the wage budget each summer (which is by far the biggest outgoing) and can also postpone any non-essential infrastructure spending. I would also like to see MCT build up its own reserve fund to cover any potential cashflow issues, but that would be a long-term goal. The other fundamentals such as ownership of the ground are not in question. Linking external funding to first team spending was a crucial weakness of the Dalrada deal in my view - though the off-ramp provided for the next 18 months should be appreciated as a final act of goodwill from Dalrada. Having that off-ramp from Dalrada and a potential opportunity to pursue is the best possible outcome given the circumstances. One slight bugbear was that the new proposal was described as providing 'revenue' - which was quite possibly a slip of the tongue, but an important one. GMFC needs capital investment from external partners which MCT also provides each year. For any partnership to work, all sides need to treat funds as an investment in the long-term development of the club - not as a sinking fund for the first team squad. Increasing revenue is the task of GMFC - through expanded and improved commercial operations, prize money from competitions etc.

A 'big win'? Oh aye, because 7th beating 9th at home in the Championship was such a huge story, that it barely filled a single paragraph in the national papers. Meanwhile we've sat out a weekend which will hopefully prove beneficial for Murray in having players recover from injuries and general knocks, but should have GMFC looking ruefully at what could have been won, with a yawningly wide open draw in the quarter finals. The Scottish Cup is multiple times more important in this and almost every other campaign to GMFC than any league game or a January transfer window, but you continue fooling yourself that we've come out of January with our standing as a club enhanced. The 'occasional' viewer stopped paying any interest after Ochilview for at least another season.

I'd like an update on this legacy tbh: https://gmfc.net/greenock-morton-announce-record-commercial-partnership-with-dalrada-technology-uk/ “The initial MCT contact with Dalrada was based on a desire to reduce our carbon footprint and we will explore opportunities to utilise Dalrada technology to achieve this."

The bold points above, in which we are massively fortunate to have 6 other teams in a 10 team division are apparently all having 'shite seasons'. Which is somehow different to the 1990s Serie A standard you bizarrely seem to think is the norm at this level. Our league campaign in terms of results and indeed performances too is entirely slap bang on track for our usual finish. And indeed where you would have placed the squad at the start of the season too "The fact that we have went on to get 4 from a possible 6 points in the league since then only reinforces my earlier point that all the knicker wetting over the stenny result was a massive over-reaction." Nice try, but the subsequent performances in fact prove precisely why the Stenhousemuir result should be treated with absolute fury. Because had we delivered a broadly competent performance as shown more often than not in our league campaign (7 defeats in 23), then we wouldn't have even remotely suffered one of our all time worst results, and would also have an ongoing interest in the season beyond the usual hype casting about promotion/relegation play-offs en route to 7th. That result was the end of our meaningful season.

It was about the fifth thread on this moribund forum, so no 'digging' required. For you to continue to claim that it is a "monumentally awful" campaign and that our current, completely predictable 7th place position is "a borderline miracle" was drama queen hysteria then, and is patently laughable nonsense now. Try as hard as some people like to generate some narrative purpose - and barring some administrative, points deduction enducing failure behind the scenes - this is season is nothing more than an insipid damp squib. It will be filed alongside all our many, many other copies of this one and be forgotten almost instantly.

Just going to bump this - as is my wont - ludicrous revisionism from a fortnight ago, to cover for the straightforward verdict of a team and management simply being incompetent to handle a single cup game. We'll be finishing 7th in the second tier just like in roughly 24 other occasions this century.

I can't agree with that because we were actually more dominant at Dingwall in the last meeting of the two teams. In that game, we should have been 0-4 up at half time without exaggeration. That's not to discredit today's performance and result - given results elsewhere we ended up really needing to secure 3 points, when I'd have taken a point beforehand. Not sure where Ross County's mini revival came from - they clearly have enough quality in their team to get out of trouble, but they remained a shiftless mess today. Brophy was outstanding in linking up play in the first hour today before he got exhausted. Gillespie also played an important role in not just keeping the ball ticking over with his own passes, but constantly showing Wilson and the new CB where to play the ball out from the back. This is the 2nd game in a row against them where Delaney has looked like peak Jordi Alba. I think he gets an unfair amount of scrutiny for not having the same strengths as the previous, dreamboat left back (playing at the exact same level). But today showed his comparative assets in pace, height as well as some promising composure in the opposition box too. He did everything right with the first time finish early in the second half, only to be denied by the keeper. Because he was signed from Inverness, I think people overlook the fact that Delaney is still only 24 playing that role. He's nowhere near club legend territory, but if some ringer from Braeside* was performing to the same level then you wouldn't hear the end of it. Good on him for hating Ross County and reliably swording them in this campaign. *The Strone and countless other scheme origins are also available.

Nine other priority areas, before adding yet another winger to this sunk cost nonsense of a squad.

Well call me picky - because I am - but I would rather have information on injuries communicated by the club itself (for example, to the Tele match preview), rather than rely on your medical expertise. Because last time I checked, Crawford was back and available to play before last Saturday's game.