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Match Preview/Thread - Arbroath vs Morton (Championship 30th April)


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53 minutes ago, Hej said:

League One could well be a stinker of a league next season with the worst case scenario of Morton +Falkirk with Queen's Park and Cove splashing the cash around.

It's not unfeasible for us to spend a couple of years down there.

In the likely event we don't survive the playoffs, we're going to be sharing the league with at least two and possibly three full-time sides in Queen's Park, Falkirk and Airdrie, two of whom have considerably bigger budgets than ours. You have an Alloa side who've been worse than us this year and will have a new manager so an unknown quantity, but who've generally sat in the top half of that league when in it. If we don't have one of Falkirk or Airdrie then we have Cove, who are another big spending outfit despite being part-time and have challenged for the title this season. There'll likely be Montrose as well who've consistently been a top half outfit.

We could get a managerial appointment spot on, recruit a good squad and win promotion ahead of that lot at the first time of asking. We could just as easily get the appointment wrong, build an even poorer squad than this shower of shite and end up following Clyde's trajectory while trying to manage the transition to new owners and possibly part-time football.

The idea that rebuilding and restructuring the club in League One is better because we can't do it while circling the drain in the Championship doesn't make sense. It's based on the false premise that there's no risk of circling the drain in League One.

Brian Wake my Lord, Brian Wake

Brian Wake my Lord, Brian Wake

Brian Wake my Lord, Brian Wake

Oh Lord, Brian Wake

 

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On the way that the wage budget has been blown, a sizeable chunk of the responsibility for that lies with the board as well as with Hopkin. Whilst managers should largely have the main say on signings, it's downright negligent for a club that is pleading poverty (and also being propped up by its fans) to allow money to be wasted in the way it was. It's not all unreasonable to tell the manager he's not being allowed to sign players like Jamie Wallace and god knows many others when there's already a host of players in a similar position, likewise McElhone should never have been allowed to sign Johnson.

Budgets aren't any kind of excuse for what's happened over the last couple of years, even if the players are all on low wages, there's fuckin loads of them and the total wage bill can't be insignificant, or at least not low enough to not be able to have a slightly higher quality, lower quantity squad. The mismanagement on all fronts has been shockingly bad.

AWMSC

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52 minutes ago, dunning1874 said:

In the likely event we don't survive the playoffs, we're going to be sharing the league with at least two and possibly three full-time sides in Queen's Park, Falkirk and Airdrie, two of whom have considerably bigger budgets than ours. You have an Alloa side who've been worse than us this year and will have a new manager so an unknown quantity, but who've generally sat in the top half of that league when in it. If we don't have one of Falkirk or Airdrie then we have Cove, who are another big spending outfit despite being part-time and have challenged for the title this season. There'll likely be Montrose as well who've consistently been a top half outfit.We could get a managerial appointment spot on, recruit a good squad and win promotion ahead of that lot at the first time of asking.

Indeed we could. But the task here is to rebuild a club after twenty years of dysfunction, not to clamber back up and pretend that everything's fine.

"We could just as easily get the appointment wrong, build an even poorer squad than this shower of shite and end up following Clyde's trajectory while trying to manage the transition to new owners and possibly part-time football."

Well no that's not equally likely at all, because:

i) Clyde are a fundamentally smaller club with fewer fans and resources - their stint in the second tier was not their natural level and 

ii) Clyde's long history of financial dysfunction - in part caused by trying to stay in a division they weren't equipped to play in - means that they have no ground, no assets and are in fact rent-paying tenants to North Lanarkshire Council, playing out of a white elephant icebox out in the sticks.

The comparison with Clyde does not stand up to any scrutiny then. 

"The idea that rebuilding and restructuring the club in League One is better because we can't do it while circling the drain in the Championship doesn't make sense. It's based on the false premise that there's no risk of circling the drain in League One."

No, that's a straw man argument that you've set up. It is based on the entirely rational understanding that it is easier to rebuild a club in total disarray behind the scenes, when the standard of football among the competing teams is also worse. The prospect of relegation in Year 1 of the new regime is a very high probability in next season's Championship: what, specifically, would this outcome achieve?

Given the realistic options available, I'd rather focus on the rebuild rather than desperate second tier survival because we do not have the resources or indeed the time this summer to do both effectively. 

The site is supposed to be a place for the extended 'family' of Morton supporters - having an affinity with people that you don't know, because you share a love of your local football club. It's not supposed to be about point scoring and showing how 'clever' or 'funny' you are, or just being downright rude and offensive to people you don't know, because you can get away with it. Unfortunately, it seems the classic case of people who have little standing/presence in real life, use this forum as a way of making themselves feel as if they are something. It's sad, and I've said that before..

 

So, having been on Morton forums for about 15 years I guess, I've had enough... well done t*ssers, another Morton supporter driven away. You can all feel happy at how 'clever' you are

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But two missing variables there are money and fan interest. Prize money and gate receipts will be lower in a lower division, almost axiomatically. (In weird events like Rangers being admitted to League Two thus wouldn't hold, but that's unusual.) 

Fan interest is a wild card, though. Hopefully the formal MCT takeover will see that increase regardless of where we end up. A League One title challenge would probably excite people more than scraping 8th in the Championship. But mid-table League One would be worse than either. 

EOho8Pw.png

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2 hours ago, Hej said:

League One could well be a stinker of a league next season with the worst case scenario of Morton +Falkirk with Queen's Park and Cove splashing the cash around.

It's not unfeasible for us to spend a couple of years down there.

And if it takes a couple of years to lay the foundations for a football club that is well-run, responsive to the fans as key stakeholders and has a wider base of income streams than 'bring a friend' then we can come out the better for it. 

In the mid-1980s Saint Johnstone were a stupid wee bumpkin outfit on the verge of financial collapse, that finished 30th out of 38 Scottish football clubs in the national leagues at that time. Under competent stewardship, they built themselves up gradually into a club that has won the Scottish Cup, multiple other trophies and has played in Europe on several occasions in the recent past. They have also been ever-presents in the top flight in the past decade.

They did not do this by insisting on returning to a higher level immediately or berating folk to show up in 4000 crowds but by building up structures behind the scenes for sustained success. And we will not achieve anything close to the same - indeed anything other than 'Championship football' being the height of our ambition for all time - unless we have the foresight and patience to get hold of the club and see out the necessary task of building it up properly.

It's not comfortable to think about it this way after 20 years of the Rae Kool-Aid, chuck another £300k on the IOU and we'll sort it outlook, but that short-termism approach has failed the club. That's the lesson we need to draw from this and the tier that we are playing in cannot be the decisive marker of success in the years to come. 

The site is supposed to be a place for the extended 'family' of Morton supporters - having an affinity with people that you don't know, because you share a love of your local football club. It's not supposed to be about point scoring and showing how 'clever' or 'funny' you are, or just being downright rude and offensive to people you don't know, because you can get away with it. Unfortunately, it seems the classic case of people who have little standing/presence in real life, use this forum as a way of making themselves feel as if they are something. It's sad, and I've said that before..

 

So, having been on Morton forums for about 15 years I guess, I've had enough... well done t*ssers, another Morton supporter driven away. You can all feel happy at how 'clever' you are

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6 minutes ago, TRVMP said:

But two missing variables there are money and fan interest. Prize money and gate receipts will be lower in a lower division, almost axiomatically. (In weird events like Rangers being admitted to League Two thus wouldn't hold, but that's unusual.) 

Fan interest is a wild card, though. Hopefully the formal MCT takeover will see that increase regardless of where we end up. A League One title challenge would probably excite people more than scraping 8th in the Championship. But mid-table League One would be worse than either. 

Prize money and gate receipts are relative to the clubs you are competing with. In a Championship that swaps out Alloa for Partick we'd be lower in the pack and would presumably still have to play dung ringers a wage to do literally nothing other than kick a ball all week, before ballooning it out of the park on matchday. 

Fan subscriptions and gate receipts are simply not going to be sustained by another turgid struggle like this campaign, which is all we stand to get from winning the play-offs. A complete reset behind the scenes and a sense of progress and ambition on and off the park gives the subscription model a fighting chance. That doesn't mean there won't be poor results (the atmosphere was toxic even at the start of 2015, just after we had lost to Spartans and then Airdrie) but given a choice between the two tiers I'm 100% convinced which one would allow us to focus on the complete rebuild needed here. 

The site is supposed to be a place for the extended 'family' of Morton supporters - having an affinity with people that you don't know, because you share a love of your local football club. It's not supposed to be about point scoring and showing how 'clever' or 'funny' you are, or just being downright rude and offensive to people you don't know, because you can get away with it. Unfortunately, it seems the classic case of people who have little standing/presence in real life, use this forum as a way of making themselves feel as if they are something. It's sad, and I've said that before..

 

So, having been on Morton forums for about 15 years I guess, I've had enough... well done t*ssers, another Morton supporter driven away. You can all feel happy at how 'clever' you are

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1 hour ago, TRVMP said:

But two missing variables there are money and fan interest. Prize money and gate receipts will be lower in a lower division, almost axiomatically. (In weird events like Rangers being admitted to League Two thus wouldn't hold, but that's unusual.) 

Fan interest is a wild card, though. Hopefully the formal MCT takeover will see that increase regardless of where we end up. A League One title challenge would probably excite people more than scraping 8th in the Championship. But mid-table League One would be worse than either. 

I'll be honest.  I've no interest in watching us on a regular basis in League 1 again.  Maybe the odd game but I've had my fill of it.  Cheers, Crawford.  

"CORNBEEF IS A BELLEND"

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I get that but at the end of the day we can't stop following the team and allow those cunts the Rae's to leave another lasting legacy.

There's a storm on the horizon

And for that I can't see the sun

For I'll keep a waiting on the pavement

For the ice cream van to come

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On 5/1/2021 at 10:47 AM, vikingTON said:

I disagree about the two up front criticism. The important thing for a large part of the game last night was to *not lose* because Ayr were actually behind at Inverness. If Inverness had made it 2-0 or 3-1 and stuck a fork in that game then we'd look pretty foolish if we 'went for the win', got picked off on the break and lost 2 or 3-0. We were in reasonable control of the game in the first hour and I don't see how we would have done better with Muirhead or Orsi up front and one fewer midfielder.

With the situation changing we did then need to push for a goal at all costs in the last half hour, which is why McGinty's latest braindead intervention killed us off. We would have been more effective with Strapp rather than McGinty at full-back in every part of our play; that was a no-brainer which is why McPherson should be shown the door. 

A fair viewpoint. However bear in mind that for about the first quarter of the game we were hardly out their half. Had we had players in a position to actually put the ball in the net, we could have had it done and dusted by then. Playing with a lone midget striker meant we didn’t do that. As the game went on, we sat back as we have done so often this season and it became a hoof-fest. I don’t rate Orsi or Muirhead but basically instead of a mediocre striker we had nobody. The game had nil (for us) written all over it despite our early dominance. It looked as if the strategy was to get a draw and hope Inverness won. And in that regard we actually achieved our side of the bargain. Inverness didn’t.

"Any nation given the opportunity to regain its national sovereignty and which then rejects it is so far beneath contempt that it is hard to put words to it."

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6 hours ago, Alibi said:

A fair viewpoint. However bear in mind that for about the first quarter of the game we were hardly out their half. Had we had players in a position to actually put the ball in the net, we could have had it done and dusted by then. Playing with a lone midget striker meant we didn’t do that. 

The reason why we were on top was because our midfield was keeping the ball fairly well between themselves and snuffing out most of the supply to their forwards. If you chuck in a Muirhead or Orsi figure up front then you have fewer players to do those two jobs in the middle of the park, unless you play a back 3. 

Given how rancid every single one of our centre forwards are, the last resort that we have with this team is actually to play Oliver as a (very) false 9 and hope that Nesbitt, McGuffie, Colville can contribute goals from midfield. 

The site is supposed to be a place for the extended 'family' of Morton supporters - having an affinity with people that you don't know, because you share a love of your local football club. It's not supposed to be about point scoring and showing how 'clever' or 'funny' you are, or just being downright rude and offensive to people you don't know, because you can get away with it. Unfortunately, it seems the classic case of people who have little standing/presence in real life, use this forum as a way of making themselves feel as if they are something. It's sad, and I've said that before..

 

So, having been on Morton forums for about 15 years I guess, I've had enough... well done t*ssers, another Morton supporter driven away. You can all feel happy at how 'clever' you are

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2 hours ago, vikingTON said:

The reason why we were on top was because our midfield was keeping the ball fairly well between themselves and snuffing out most of the supply to their forwards. If you chuck in a Muirhead or Orsi figure up front then you have less players to do those two jobs in the middle of the park, unless you play a back 3. 

Given how rancid every single one of our centre forwards are, the last resort that we have with this team is actually to play Oliver as a (very) false 9 and hope that Nesbitt, McGuffie, Colville can contribute goals from midfield. 

I’d have been inclined to play Nesbitt up front. He’s a wasteful finisher, but he’s popped up with a goal occasionally - also when he’s playing as what I assume is meant to be a wide midfielder, his crosses are not too productive aimed at a lonely Oliver. In essence of course, if we had signed someone like Jack Hamilton, that would have solved our problem. We are lacking in the required second player up front, made worse by the fact that Oliver is not suitable for that role. It all comes back to Hopkin’s door.

"Any nation given the opportunity to regain its national sovereignty and which then rejects it is so far beneath contempt that it is hard to put words to it."

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