vikingTON

Shaw was an abysmal, gutless chancer tonight, and the fact that this is earning a pass is why we cannot ever have nice things at this once-proud football club. I don't disagree about your other points but this is precisely the problem - the standards at this club plummet so low that being the least bad of several dogshit performers gets viewed as being within the acceptable range. It shouldn't - and unless we are finally ruthless enough to purge this club of such low expectations, then next season is already bounded between 7th and 10th. So Murray will be fielding them at centre back alongside Wilson next season then. An utterly rancid shout btw, given that Stevie Wonder could have picked a more logical team tonight than the 'proper fitba man' in the dugout. Unless you think that there was some stunning tactical masterplan at work tonight - and last Saturday, and the one before that - that only an innate experience of the game can possibly comprehend.

What goes around finally came around for Strapp, after his dying swan routine for a carbon copy challenge got Ballantyne sent off at their midden to turn the game.

+15 other players and backroom staff

Johansson and Grady were punted for lesser shitting the bed behaviour, than Ian Murray in the past 6 weeks. TTG.

Airdrie are not very good at all, but this has 0-1 written all over it. Probably with a red card based off the stupid yellows picked up so far.

Ambrose should playing in jeans in the second half.

He's clueless. He clearly doesn't rate Shaw at all - which is why he was immediately bombed out the team from January - yet he plays him in back to back crucial games at the end of the season. That is worse than the Wilson at centre back choice, because it's crystal clear that Murray has zero rating of Shaw and yet shoehorns him into this nick of a formation anyway. We cannot afford to give a summer transfer window to someone who has marginalised almost all the players he added in January, and ended up like this.

If Wilson is listed on the team sheet in an apparent centre back position, then Murray should be sacked before kick off. Worked very well indeed when Johansson was stinking the place out on a final day of the season.

What ambition does GMFC demonstrate exactly - and where does the earlier list of the past 30 years of dross fit into that? Even the now maligned Queen of the South reached a Scottish Cup final and briefly played in European football: Dunfermline have been up and down like a whore's knickers and yet are in a SC final as a second tier club. Never mind managers for a moment: how many executives have been emptied for such a lamentable record of non-achievements and zero progress as a commercial enterprise at GMFC too? If this is the sum total of our aspiration then we're as well shuttering the club after Friday's game regardless of the result. Surviving in this league - with no broader purpose or goal in mind beyond that - is categorically not an achievement.

• We have both lost to a team fully two tiers below us, and been gubbed 4-0 by Stenhousemuir in cup competitions this season. • It will be 35 years next season since we have reached the final of even the lower leagues' cup competition. • As of next season (removing 95-96 from the equation), we will have had one, very unlikely, sniff at top flight football in the past 30 years. • 2013-14 league campaign: all of it. Sounds rather like both the Banter Years and the wilderness are already here. Given all of the above, I fail to see any discernible impact of GMFC playing either in the second or third tier. It changes nothing of consequence. Unlike 2007-08 for example - when the hope was that if we could get survive, we would then consolidate and move upwards in the second tier - there is no such direction in place right now. If we 'survive', the tacit goal will be to get 44 points and finish 7th and do absolutely nothing else again next season. Meanwhile there is a similar lack of direction in terms of the club as a business. We are no further towards maximising revenue from matchdays, and have no concrete plans in place to start generating revenue on the other 300-odd days of the year either. So what exactly would playing in the second or third tier change? We have (or should have) little to no debt to outside creditors to account for, and by far the largest chunk of the operating budget is a first team squad and model of recruitment that is taking us nowhere, regardless of Friday's result. So the loss of divisional prize money (a risibly low, rentier-type aspiration for this once-proud club to have) can be balanced by simply purging more of the crop of players and backroom staff who directly caused that scenario. Let me be clear - I am not claiming that seaside league football will be a nostalgic improvement on our current status. But unless and until fundamental changes in the club's operations and aspirations take place, both scenarios are equally garbage. If there is a change in how the club and the first team squad operates, it will likely come through a successful partnership with Estrella regardless of what level we are playing in. That is the important thing in defining the club's future - not being a couple of places higher or lower in the middle of Scottish football's pecking order.

Murray has had an objectively easier set of fixtures though, as Imrie left before we played both QP and Airdrie at home to complete the first half. The interim team handled those two games, as well as the Saint Johnstone, Ayr and Partick games in the second half of the campaign that rather helpfully do not count towards Murray's record. Indeed, we are recording worse results in recent weeks than when the interim coaches were in charge. While there have been encouraging signs in the home matches in terms of how we have played and some good results recorded, the away league record under Murray is atrocious and today was just another example of that.

Even with the players who played today alone though, Murray could have fielded an outfield team like this: Comrie Moore Longridge (OR Lopata-White) Ballantyne Blues Wilson Gillespie (OR Crawford) Any two sand dancers Main Such a lineup certainly isn't good enough to be finishing in the promotion play-offs, but it also wouldn't be shipping 4 goals, while barely registering a shot across 90 minutes, against that dogshit Ross County side. It wouldn't be getting completely overrun just like in almost every previous away league match since Murray came in. That's on him. Then we have the mysterious vanishing act of various players from the first team and now the squad altogether. Delaney ripped Ross County to shreds in the previous two meetings - we had Longridge in the same role today. And as for not trusting players - two centre halves were brought in during January, while another defender in Longridge was bizarrely given a new contract a couple of weeks ago. None of those three played more than 45 minutes today under Murray. So he's not resisting changes because of a lack of trust in a squad he inherited - he's got no ideas about how to change it. The same was apparent even in games that we won like at home to Arbroath: his in-game management was terrible.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing time and time again while expecting a different outcome, then Ian Murray should be sectioned under the Mental Health Act for: • persisting with three completely useless sand dancers contributing nothing behind a centre forward (who was also pish) • persisting with Gillespie in a central midfield two, leaving us out of our depth in the middle of the park, and above all • persisting with the Wilson at centre back nonsense The players put on a truly abject, nick of a display themselves, but it is Ian Murray who accepts it. We know he accepts it, because he fields the same garbage lineup and formation every single away game, and makes nothing other than laughable, token like for like substitutions during the match. At 2-0 down after 15 minutes, there should have been wholesale changes to both the shape and personnel. If a manager messes up the starting lineup, that happens. The job of the manager is to adjust and try to fix those failures, instead of just gormlessly laying a massive turd. Most damningly, we look less organised and coherent a side than when Murray took over - so he's bringing little on the training ground to compensate for a risible lack of in game management. Murray should not be managing the team on Friday night - never mind next season.

I disagree with this, because the interim period didn't deliver notably more (or less) 'rotten results' than the regimes either side of it. Getting shoed at Saint Johnstone is completely irrelevant. Now we should have beaten Airdrie at home under the interim team, but didn't - but we also should have beaten Queens' Park at home, but didn't, on Saturday. And it wasn't under the interim management that we contrived to lose 3-0 at Airdrie or at QP, while we did in fact beat QP at Cappielow when required under interim management back in December. Once you account for the strength of opposition, their records are effectively the same. On a wider point, the 'big chances missed' mantra strikes me as a seriously dubious factoid, given how hopelessly subjective a term that is. The sniff test of this campaign, in my view at least, really does not support a swashbuckling Morton team that has created stacks of chances but somehow failed to put them away. But even if you do buy that category, I suspect that the number of 'big chances conceded' would also be rather large too, certainly since Imrie left. As a defensive unit from front to back, this team can't keep weans out of a close and our frankly rancid away form under Murray is an outcome of this.