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Maclean must have a stash of highly incriminating pictures of King Snake, there can be no other rational explanation for the repeated signing of such a useless sand dancer.

Andy Jackson has rejoined Brechin from Forfar as part of the Angus footballer roulette system: one that will hopefully be pared back once that stupid wee village social club gets emptied into the Highland League in May.

Dunfermline have replaced Kiltie with Dom 'Dom' Thomas on loan from Killie, which is a major downgrade IMO and therefore good news for ourselves tomorrow. He'll probably still score one of his three trick shots per season at Cappielow though.

That’s never stopped us from signing players in the past.

Queens' Park haven't been a football team since about 1900.

A ‘proper footballer’ who can’t he even get a game for a midtable outfit in the seaside leagues and had us playing such spellbinding football under Johansson just last season. It isn’t a binary choice between Tidser or what we have right now: the manager’s job is to get a player who is better than what we have but is also i) not a mercenary snake ii) not as immobile as all of the above options and unfortunately iii) also within the range of a straitened (though not ridiculous) budget.

So would about 15,000 professional footballers who don’t also happen to be double-mercenary snakes though. It’s a ‘get in the sea’ from me for anyone who peddles this nonsense.

Raith Rovers fans are, to a man, gormless simpletons though.

Sir Richard with the assist for Livingston's (sad!) opener today.

The fucking nick of this football club right now.

East of Scotland senior haddies but they should be punted back into the Juniors to rot for good after such an embarrassing result against Grangemouth tonight. Sad!

Michael ‘King Snake’ Tidser not even making the bench for a team haplessly losing out to ‘Airdrie’ for a seaside league crown. A terrible, wee shame all round.

You address him by his proper title(s), you little bollocks.

I will see your uncanny depiction of O'Ware on the Partick thread and raise you the last ten pages of the Falkirk thread on P and B after their team got bodied by 'Clyde' on Saturday: https://www.pieandbovril.com/forum/index.php?/topic/138524-the-falkirk-fc-thread/page/4626/#comments Drink it in.

Making his missus 'accidentally' and repeatedly fall down a flight of stairs seems the much more likely threat posed by that scumbag. But so long as he made a good impression while glad-handing a few proles then there's simply no reason why the club shouldn't drag its name through the mud by bringing him back.

Ah bless, another one of those deluded lower league Scottish football fans who think that they've got a right - or even worse, a so-called 'tradition*' - of seeing 'fitba played thu right way'. You don't. It's not Ajax or Barcelona you're dealing with here: you'll take what you can get so long as it gets results. Which it does. The vast majority of the 'turgid, boring football' I've seen at Cappielow has been played by the Largs-bred football philosophers who think that passing the ball slowly around a back four all day long is some sort of great contribution to the game. It isn't. Getting the ball forward in the most direct manner possible - so long as you have the players at your disposal to do something with it in the opposition third - is both superior in terms of results and entertainment. As was borne out by Friday night's game on Alba, which had more goalscoring chances and genuine entertainment from David Irons' team than all of Jonatan Johansson's dismal, possession-based borefests put together. The idea that 'oh well, we can't possibly compete to reach a league stacked with dross like Hamilton, Livingston, Ross County and the spoon-burners, so let's just try and play pretty passing football instead' is exactly the sort of attitude that has been stinking out this football club ever since the Rae's took over. As soon as a team goes behind, it's 'get the baw on the deck' time from the braying masses - as if the collection of second tier jobbers on the park will be transformed into the Ajax '95 side by that simple innovation. There's no appetite at the club for the sufficient pragmatism and ruthlessness to do what it takes to actually punch above our weight for the first time in a generation; rather, there's a willingness to gobble up endless failure so long as it's nice to look at for a change. It's times like this where I think that the fanbase has fully deserved the tragic football team that it's had over recent years. * see Falkirk, whose typically gormless fanbase think that they've got a 'tradishun of exciting forward play' because they had Russell Latapy once

A style designed to win football games in the most brutally effective manner possible, including (but not exclusive to) the following traits: - filling your team with six foot plus hammer throwers - playing high balls for them to dominate the opposition with brute force - deliberately injuring your own players playing for corners and (long) throw-ins, to capitalise on the above advantages Its polar opposite being of course the 'philosophy of football' nonsense being taught at Largs and which various, two-bob Guardiolas have tried and spectacularly failed to implement in the Scottish lower leagues (see Caldwell, G.; Johannsson, J; Grady, J. etc.).

David Irons continues a remarkable turnaround at Stenhousemuir by papping 'Irish Premier League' side Waterford out of the cup with a last minute winner. Scott McLaughlin also got on the scoresheet with *sucks air sharply through teeth* an excellent free kick. Four games unbeaten by reverting to direct, cynical football and shelling the opposition with set pieces. What a manager.

Unless it's an awful foul on Tidser, like Peter MacDonald's glorious effort on Andy Millen, then I won't be watching that seaside league drivel.

Except for the fact that his position and the manager instructing him didn’t change at all between the 12/13 season (performances good; team not shipping goals for fun) and the following one, in which he was utterly abysmal and it did. So we can file that ‘wrong position’ excuse in the bin where it belongs then. FWIW I’d put it at around 15% incompetence- largely ball-watching and so letting midfielders run straight through at our shambolic defence (sounds familiar right now) and 85% being a disinterested mercenary.

This is complete and utter nonsense; when Hands for example played it was almost always in a 4-2-3-1; similar with Taggart when Shiels moved him there. And Bachirou, the player with the most appearances in the squad that season, was always the other player in that two.

It's really not a mystery at all. Bachirou's performances in the last year at the club were truly abysmal and the only two logical explanations are: i) he was completely out of his depth playing in the Scottish Championship or ii) he was barely trying a leg having slithered back to the club after an entire summer spent flashing his knickers in the free agent market to no avail The only real debate going on for the past five years is how much of that garbage return could be attributed to column i) and how much to column ii). So all your observation does is further the 'mercenary snake' thesis, albeit long after the facts and his tactically inept displays at a far lower level.

A trait that he showed in spades at New Douglas Park when he tirelessly won the ball and broke down all Hamilton attacks (other than the ten that he actually waved through like a McGills bus).

The only person dealing in revisionism here is yourself. There was no such thing as 'the holding midfielder' role that season because the formation was typically a variant of 4-2-3-1: the two players situated in front of the defence being instructive here. That you think having some total jobber playing a similar role suddenly gave Bachirou total creative freedom to ship 70 league goals in that campaign is utterly ridiculous nonsense.

I see Gerrard is seething that Sir Richard elbowed ‘Joe Aribo’ in the head, gave him a twenty-stitch wound and escaped without even a booking. Not quite that last minute, ten man, Sir Gavin inspired equaliser against them on their own, horrible midden, but another mark on his good guy scorecard regardless.