Greacen2000

sorry if i gave you the impression that my suggestion was implying that I think said goals are in any way credible or genuine. I don’t. But they do differ from Dales in 1 important respect - he didn’t hang around long enough to be judged upon his, whereas Robinson and Laird are still here. What I’m saying is that rather than taking the nuclear option of emptying Robinson and Laird at the earliest opportunity (which in doing so would carry the risk of funding being withdrawn) we should instead challenge them to demonstrate the progress(or lack thereof) made against their own self-defined performance goals I 100% agree. So let him be held answerable to it per my response to 1) It certainly seems that way, but I’m ok with waiting to see what comes out in the January meeting. fair enough. I agree with everything you are saying here & i very much want to expedite meaningful change as soon as possible. I’m just not willing to do it if it risks destabilising the club & jeopardising the funding to see us through at least until the end of the season (which would be the case unless Bonar has a change of heart on the requirement that Laird & Robinson remain in place). If moves are made to remove Robinson & Laird while Bonar still wants them to remain in place, then we will in fact find ourselves in exactly the same position as we were over the summer. I 100% share your fears here. I am just not sure that emptying Laird & Robinson at the first opportunity is the best move. My reasons being 1. as stated above it would break a condition of this seasons funding agreement 2. The club is already running on fumes from a leadership & administrative POV with no GM or Finance Director in place, so unless there are better options waiting to step in and replace them, I don’t think emptying 2 guys who are actively involved in the day to day running of the club is a good idea.

Christmas Pop UP Shop & Signing Night takes place this evening! - Greenock Morton FC Nice to see the club putting this sort of thing on - it's a shame it only seems to have been promoted on the day of the event (unless I missed an earlier announcement). Hopefully it is well attended and makes the club a few extra bob from Christmas presents. Sadly I wont be able to make it down as I live out of town and need more than a days notice

Thanks for the update Toby. It’s good to hear that this stuff is in hand, especially when there is so much else going on. I appreciate the time you guys are putting in

@MCT Team @Toby @BishopBrennan could one of you please advise what the process & timing will be for reviewing current MCT representation on the GMFC board & nominating new rep(s)? I am just a bit concerned that at present only 1 of 4 GMFC board members are MCT reps. Adding Laird into the mix, we effectively have 3 Dalrada nominated people of influence involved in day-to-day running of the club & only 1 from the clubs owner. Secondly, at the time of the Dalrada deal being agreed, a commitment was made to hold a review meeting in January to assess the situation & discuss options. Now that we are into December, it would be good to know when this will be taking place. Thanks

Hopefully it goes the same way as the first choice of players that their finances have afforded them.

Pleasing -both out of my disdain for Ayr and my aversion to partick winning the league. I fully expect my schadenfreude to come back to haunt me tomorrow but will enjoy it for now

Corrected - thanks for pointing that out. But seriously, which one is black?

Do me a favour please and lemme know which of these is blue and which is black (taken from the shorts in the photo that was sent out with the vote) specs or no specs the club need to do better here. Almost everyone I spoke to about this thought that option b is black & yellow. Add to this the fact many will be reading their email on a phone screen. It would have been nice if they had provided slightly better images

No idea - I expect the info on season ticket holders etc is held by fanbase but they must have some sort of database on the back end to support tontv subscriptions etc. MCT have purchased a CRM tool (sheepCRM) but apparently the work on fully implementing it was paused when all the stuff over the summer happened. This needs to be resumed as a priority now things have settled down and the new board is in place as it is key to how we engage with members and manage membership & fund raising efforts. In lieu of this I’m guessing the best case scenario is that its probably being run on a spreadsheet

The meeting started with the news about Remi and a minutes silence. MCT will be working with the club in agreeing on what is appropriate in terms of for the family, hospital staff, charity etc. Apologies were given with MCTs current representatives on the club board being absent from the meeting. Then followed a board update giving high level overview of what has happened in the past year in terms of overall financial contributions to the club, members who have joined & left the board. Not a huge amount of note here. The turmoil of the summer was mentioned but not discussed in detail It was confirmed that all nominees have been approved to join the board. More detailed financial breakdown was then given. Overall contributions from MCT to the club have dropped by about 20K in the past year. This is attributed to a 50k per annum contribution from a benefactor coming to an end, which has been offset by a slight rise in member contributions. A further 10K was given to MCT as part of the estate of a member who passed away and this money has been given to MITC to go towards match tickets for deprived/low income people in the community. 2 amendments were put forward - the first one was just correcting an error in wording replacing "charity" with "company", which passed with ease. The 2nd amendment was proposed by Stuart Duncan around revoking membership if payments are stopped. Stuart pitched it as a way of protecting MCT income by discouraging people from cancelling/reducing contributions. This was faced with a fair amount of questions and disagreement. In general people seemed to agree that work needs to be done in this area, but that kicking people out of MCT probably isn't the best way to go about it in the first instance. More needs to be done to generate new & increased contributions while looking at ways of allowing people who cannot afford £10 per month to be involved - both tiered memberships & payment holidays were mentioned alongside providing more incentives for people to join & contribute. Gordon Richie highlighted that in its current form, the proposal would lead to a benefactor who has contributed over 100K to MCT being at risk of losing their membership if they cancelled a £10 direct debit. Stuart was given the opportunity to withdraw the proposal but did not take it up. It went forward to the vote and was not passed. The new board will take the action to look into this area in more detail before coming back to the membership with further proposals. During the discussion on the 2nd amendment a lot of other information came out. It seems like due to legacy issues with gaps in admin/process when MCT was first set up, we do not know exactly how much any given member has contributed in total, and aren't even exactly sure how many non paying members there are. Work on implementing a proper CRM with a database of all member details was stalled due to the turmoil over the summer but should be resuming now that things are settled. This work needs to take place before we will have the ability to run targeted funding campaigns or implement tiered memberships etc. All in all it was a pretty constructive meeting with a lot less fireworks than might have been expected. I would say that the news of Remis passing would have understandably been a factor in some of the discussions being a bit more muted.

Both guys are Aberdeen legends and have a greater legacy with them than they do with us (both in terms of games played & honours won). As such, it was inevitable that they would get an especially warm welcome from their fans, and it’s only to be expected that they would reciprocate. I agree that it’s not a great look but for me the mistake was in bringing them out at half time, or indeed having them as guests for that match in the first place. That said, a bit more self awareness from them would certainly have helped

I think Tidser will be a great signing for Montrose. Even at his peak he was never a guy who was blessed with much pace, so I wouldn't imagine being 35 will hold him back much once he gets match fit. I would even go as far as to say that I wouldn't have minded us signing him if we didn't already have a full compliment of veteran midfielders.

Yup, and going by the amount of folk I saw walking down Sinclair st eating pies at full time, they must have had a bunch of unsold stuff that they gave away again. How much is a pie - £3 or £4? So going by my back of a fag packet calculations, if they sold only an extra 25 pies, that saved wastage would be enough to cover the cost of another 2 members of staff (assuming 3 hours at minimum wage). Seems like a bit of a no brainer

just for TL/DR purposes, here is an example of 1 way we could revise the offering based on my above suggestions (notwithstanding other things that could be done on the entertainment & catering front) - Tier 3 - Access to Douglas Rae Lounge, Pre match pie & pint, half time pie & hot drink, paid bar - £35 (£25 for season ticket holders) Tier 2 - Access to Douglas Rae Lounge, Pre match pie & pint, half time pie & hot drink, paid bar, 3 course meal - £70 (£55 for season ticket holders) Tier 1 - Access to Douglas Rae Lounge, Pre match pie & pint, half time pie & hot drink, complimentary bar, 3 course meal - £110 (£90 for season ticket holders)

I have enjoyed the experience whenever I have attended and honestly think £100 per person for 3 course meal & bottomless drinks is pretty good value for money. That said, if it is undersubscribed then the onus is on the club to come up with some ideas to freshen up the offering & generate more interest I suspect more could probably be done to bring in more corporate hospitality as the last few times I have attended it felt like most of the tables were taken up by punters. Aside from that, maybe offering more pricing tiers could get bums on seats. At the moment the only offerings are £79/89 for paid bar & £99/109 for complimentary bar. For starters I would say they could do with dropping the paid bar price by 20 quid. Then maybe introduce another tier below that - Pie & a pint for £20/30 as they have done on occasion in the past. £10 discount for season ticket holders also feels a bit snidey. A matchday ticket costs £22 so the discount should be more proportionate to that, Maybe also offer some tie-ins to incentivise season ticket sales and/or MCT membership such as a voucher for 1 discounted hospitality package per season for each season ticket holder/MCT member or even a weekly/monthly draw to win free hospitality. The last suggestion doesn't directly generate more hospitality income but it gives an extra incentive to buy a season ticket or join MCT, and if I win a free hospitality day there is an increased likelihood that 1 or 2 of my mates will pay to join me there. This is just a few things off the top of my head and I am sure loads more could be done. I do also agree with the above comments that big Andy retiring is a huge loss as he was great company and very entertaining

Even if fully fit I don’t think he would offer much to the team. It’s 10 years since he has been in any way prolific in terms of goal return. And as Dunning says above i don’t think the optics would be very good. Fair play to him for coming out and saying this. I hope he gets his life back on track and gets a chance somewhere - just not here.

Reece Lyon scores a hat-trick for Queen of the south against Edinburgh City

Yup this is very poor. 2 great servants to the club have moved without any acknowledgement or thanks, while Dale (who hasn’t achieved much during his short time here) gets a statement thanking him for his efforts. Little things like this take virtually no time or effort to get right, so it’s pretty frustrating and feels a bit like the club are trolling us or trying to piss people off.

Yeah it’s such a chore when you post something on a public forum and people have the audacity to actually reply. For what it’s worth, I don’t rank the design of the strip particularly high on my list of Morton related priorities at this moment either. The fact however that they have actually ordered and now started selling them with Dalrada as the sponsor before any deal has been signed is another indication that the people running the club at the moment are not doing a very good job. You could argue that making a big fanfare about strip launches & early bird season tickets while staying quiet on more important matters is a bit tone deaf from the club too, but if they hadn’t been launching the strip & season ticket then we would probably be criticising them for inactivity in this area so I will give them a pass on that one at least

Yup I would say that’s another question for us all to email them. “If this deal is rejected, will Dalrada still be our shirt sponsor for this season? If so, how much are they paying us?”

I’m no expert, but does the fact that this is based on OTC trades (as opposed to being listed on an exchange) change this? Eg if a company that’s publicly traded sees a big slide in its value, that indicates a lack of confidence in the market with a lot of people selling off the shares with low demand from buyers. As I understand, OTC value is based on person to person trades, so couldn’t this drop in price just be due to a single transaction at an agreed (low) price? Without knowing who was selling and who was buying it is hard to interpret exactly what it means. Like I said, I’m no expert so am happy to be told I’m talking shite if someone else knows better. Just asking the question

As long as there aren’t any pieces of the structure which are loose or at risk of falling etc then they will still be able to play games at Cappielow either by cordoning off the affected area or by just letting people stand there anyway and get wet if it rains. It’s possible said contingency plan involves one of the above.

On the subject of the vacant plot of land (and lack of progress in the development thereof), obviously stuff like that has a tendency to slip down the list of priorities in light of our razor thin margins, especially so when unforeseen bills come up as we have seen today. My vision for developing it would be to look at cost effective ways of making use of the area without necessarily having to actually build a new bricks & mortar structure. I can imagine having some repurposed shipping containers around the perimeter which would be fitted out for bar, catering & toilet facilities, then a central area having some bench seating & being covered by a tensile fabric/shade sail to protect from the elements. The cost & timelines of planning & implementing this sort of a development would be significantly less than putting up a new building in the plot. There are also a lot of businesses in the local area who would be well positioned to help with these sorts of plans (peel ports for the containers, several sailmakers nearby for the canopy, builders & joiners for the ground work & fit out etc). Obviously it would still require the club to invest a significant sum of money, but there could be potential there to have some of the costs covered by these businesses in exchange for promotion/advertising etc, and we could end up with something that would function as a fan zone on matchdays and have potential as a mixed use venue for hire the rest of the time.

Absolute nightmare for the club but not exactly surprising. That roof has been there over 20 years IIRC and has been showing signs of its age for some time now. There is no such thing as a good time for this to happen, but it is a real kick in the balls for this to come hot on the heels of the repair bill for the gas leak and at a time when our cashflow will have been pretty much zero for almost a month Hopefully we are covered for these repairs under insurance, and any shortfalls on that front can be met per above suggestions by crowd funding and/or support from local businesses. Could also be an opportunity for the club to sell advertising/sponsorship space on the new roof (I am sure that Fir park has or at least used to have adverts on the roof of a similarly constructed stand). Probably unrealistic but wouldn't it great if there was a way of installing a camera gantry at the same time as replacing the roof.

Gutted to see him join one of our rivals but he was never going to be coming back here with the history between him & Dougie (whatever that is) along with what happened when he left us last time. Even if there had been a chance of us signing him, unlike last season I wouldn’t have wanted it to happen. I’m happy with the job Delaney is doing there, and if funds are available in January there are other positions that need strengthened more urgently.