dunning1874

This is the thing, the logic behind signing Reynolds and Davies in the first place is defensible. Managers careers live and die by those gambles on recruitment but you can see why he made them. Then it became very quickly apparent in the League Cup that both of them will never be good enough and he took another gamble on JET, a different kind of gamble but one that also made sense. We can definitively say already that he got them all wrong but they can all be put down to the trials of being a manager with a small budget. When you're already in that position, you've made three gambles which have exploded in your face, you absolutely need your one last signing with the money left to fix your season, signing McGinn makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. He may well be a better player and despite not being one even a better centre forward than all of them, but that's really a case of bad money after bad money when no matter how highly you rate him, he is clearly not solving the centre forward problem that is absolutely crippling us. In the context of when he signed him it's a worse case of money on a bonfire than Ally Roy.

Another terrible result, with the evidently perfectly good Cappielow pitch not suiting our galacticos removed from the list of excuses. It already feels like we're just treading water until January when we'll be several points adrift in bottom, but might not be so far behind that getting rid of Reynolds, Davies and JET (McGinn may join this group but I'll not condemn him to it yet despite the signing making even less sense than Ally Roy) in one fell swoop to combine their wages to find one player who can actually be called a centre forward can't scrape us into 8th.

Apparently the disciplinary rules changed for this season so a red card in any competition only means a suspension in that competition regardless of what it was for, SFA haven't published the new rules for this season on their website as they usually would but other players who got straight reds last weekend are starting today so we're fine.

I'll give the benefit of the doubt that Baird isn't fit to start after missing out last week rather than Broadfoot genuinely being chosen over him, but this is still bad. With Wilson out I can't believe he's sticking with only one sitting player, no idea if that's going to be more like 4-1-3-2 with McGinn beside JET or McGinn in a three off JET with Lyall dropping back beside Gillespie to do a bad impression of a deep lying playmaker, but asking someone who isn't Iain Wilson to do that amount of defensive work by themselves is asking for trouble.

On top of the obvious concern of what on earth to do at centre forward every week which makes it hard enough to see how we win games, we'll have one of King or Blues at full back as well. You just can't see this going well.

To be played 12/13 October. We're already away to them in the league on 26 October, as if it wasn't boring enough already.

He's 22 and he's already had a whole season in League Two and half a season in League One. If he's going to be good enough for the Championship he needs to show it now.

Job done ultimately but that was an abysmal performance, which could easily have turned into an all time humiliating stain on this football club's history. We simply don't have a squad good enough to not struggle to break down a poor Lowland League team. While we're good enough defensively to not be near a 13/14 level rabble in terms of goals conceded, today was the day I became fairly sure this squad will be doing exceptionally well to make a 30+ points total, because we simply aren't going to score goals from open play against Championship teams. Garrity is lightyears ahead of Emmanuel-Thomas, McGinn, Davies and Reynolds as a centre forward, it's not even his position and it's still to be seen whether he's good enough for this level in his actual position. That is our biggest threat at centre forward and it says far more about those four than it does about Garrity. Until we sign a footballer who's worthy of even claiming to be a striker we won't get near winning league games, and if that doesn't happen until January we're already down. We also remain horribly short in defensive options, next week with Delaney suspended will be a right laugh. King or Blues as full backs against a Championship team is not a remotely credible option yet here we are, a million anywhere across the front three attackers stockpiled so we can have no full backs.

Finally 1-0. Garrity literally stumbling it over the line sums it up but thank christ.

We're not just struggling to break them down, they've looked far more like scoring than we have. In some sense this was a no win game you couldn't read much into, eg if Reynolds or Davies come off the bench and score a hattrick against Lowland League opposition it doesn't mean they can do it against Championship teams. What you can conclude is what players can't do against Championship opposition if they can't do it against a bottom half Lowland League team. Lyall cannot play in a deep lying two, he plays in the middle of an attacking three or not at all. He's absolutely terrible in this role. McGinn is not a lone striker, as anyone who's watched the 37 year old winger at any time in his career before now could have told you. If you're signing him to play there, then pause and rethink everything you know about football. If we fail to win this game it will be the worst result in the club's history by a massive distance. Right now we're showing absolutely no sign of doing it.

Blues is having a Rabin Omar at right back performance.

Ballantyne centre back, Blues right back, Lyall sitting beside King, McGinn up himself, but changes in possession sometimes to Garrity pushing up beside McGinn and Lyall pushing up as well. This is really not very good.

It's maybe nothing as the meaning is unclear, but there's a potentially very concerning comment in Imrie’s match preview for today. "It's been a summer with a big transition in terms of players coming and going, how pleased have you been with the business that's been done so far?" "Yeah really really pleased. As a manager you're always looking to add, unfortunately we don't have that scope to do that, but again..." he then goes on to thank the board for increasing the budget in the summer. If he's just talking in general terms there about not having the budget to compete with other Championship clubs so we missed out on some players he wanted to add throughout the summer, fine. If he actually means the budget is now fully spent so he can't sign anyone else then that is a disaster when we still have no centre forwards worthy of the name and only two full backs. It would make the McGinn signing even worse if he's prioritised him over finding an actual striker.

Well, by this standard he's tripling down on Reynolds. We all already know he can't contribute anything either, but he's getting minutes in every game.

Absolutely not claiming he's actually looked close to good enough as he's been out of his depth even against League Two and Highland League sides, but I thought Davies was at least fine when he came on at Livingston. He actually did offer an outball and brought a couple of high balls down under pressure then found a teammate, which amounts to more of a positive contribution than Reynolds and JET combined over the Livingston and Falkirk games. Obviously he did that coming on on the wing rather than centre forward, we've seen enough already to know that we can't play him as a lone striker, that's only one competent performance while over the piece he's still been miles off it and maybe Imrie has seen something in training to lead him to Davies being the one who's already written off entirely when his one competent performance is a better competitive contribution than some others. When we're persisting with two up front though it would be worth seeing if he's any better at that than he was as a lone striker, because if the alternative impact sub at centre forward is Reynolds it genuinely isn't possible to contribute less.