vikingTON

Partick have just 2 home games left to play now - one against Hamilton (obvious win) and one against Falkirk on the penultimate week. Their away record is as mediocre as our own, so the idea that they're automatically getting those points at Airdrie and Dunfermline is false. Raith getting 3 points not only narrows our room for maneuvre - it also makes our trip there on the penultimate weekend far more difficult than if they're already done for the season. Then there's fact that we're also playing for 5th/6th prize money, which is assisted by points being left on the table. The far bigger stumbling block is our own ability to get points with ongoing absences. We would likely need 7 points from the three home games this week, any comparable performance to last week will finish that off. If we are within touching distance (and Raith are not) by the second last week, then there will always be an outside chance.

I'd certainly to see a change in the forward line, given that everyone at the club recognises how poor that first hour or so was at Hamilton. We can only get through this spell by pressing more effectively from the front - especially at Cappielow which is better suited for this.

Birthday caird pish. How many years did Glasgow Rangers have as a club, until they got done for not paying their debt? Scottish football has a pyramid in which Dumbarton (just as much as ourselves or any other club) have no divine right to play at the national level of the SPFL. The onus is on every club to cut their cloth to suit their current situation. If you do that, fail to make the most of your limited resources and you end up dropping out of the national leagues like East Stirling, Albion Rovers or Brechin then that's just tough. Why should Stranraer or another club drop down instead while Dumbarton are not paying their bills? Scottish football should implement a system of Financial Fair Play to stop piss-taking being passed off as ambishun in as good as real time. But until either the authorities or the clubs grasp that nettle, the only measure available is to punish the outcome of sustained mismanagement (administration) rather than its instigation. We cannot pick and choose which clubs 'deserve' sanction for that outcome.

Dumbarton's owners were a bunch of Walter Mittys and their underlying business was unsustainable. What gives them the right to claim extra prize money at the expense of Elgin, Stirling Albion etc. in the league below? The points deduction system is too lenient in the sense that repeat offences should be sanctioned massively - 100 points - and any outstanding negative points should roll into the following campaign regardless of division.

How are these determined in practice - is Hamilton's 'entry level' demotion tied to their cheque bouncing issues on player wages at the start of the season (before finding another magic 'warchest' to pay for McKinstry, Lamie et al among the 600 fans that showed up on Saturday)?

Think you're overlooking Bannatyne who pretty much shut down that side of the pitch in our dreadful hour, and also created a fair amount once Davies came on in front of him too.

Hamilton are finished after losing that game at home today from such an obviously string position at HT (and they're all atrocious away from home too). I can see Airdrie catching one if not both of them and Dunfermline in the run-in - that performance and result today stank of relegation. Which would be a terrible, wee shame given the four figure sums they've been chucking at 'Oli Shaw', Todorov, McKinstry etc. We are absolutely safe now because that rabble are not getting more than 6 points.

Why is Cameron Keay not on international duty next weekend when no fewer than four - 4! - utter jobbers playing for relegation bound Dunfermline are away and causing their game to be postponed? I'm not discussing some shan under 21 'cap' either - play him ahead of that fat-head mess Shankland right now. Sad!

3-5-2 was not working on such a wide park and with little direct centre forward play from Hamilton to engage with. Switching to a back four has made us marginally less poor but we should still be at least 2 goals down here. Put Keay on for Shaw and prepare Garrity to replace Moffat soon as well - the forward line has offered almost nothing either aa an attacking threat or simply defending from the front. Don't like Blues on the left side of midfield either - we can just swap him and Lyall without changing anything else. One being in prison is the watch we won to (almost certainly) consolidate our league status though. That border and customs official should be awarded our player of the year.

Jimmy 'Jimmy' Knowles seems to have scored an actual, legitimate goal in the English National League (tier 5) for Boston United. Who he? Courtesy of his Wikipedia page (maw curated I suspect): 'The Mansfield Town club website described Knowles as a forward with "great work ethic, possesses bags of pace and has an eye for goal".' Mansfield Town proving to be a pedlar of fake news, given Knowles 0 goals in 10 appearances with The Famous in season 2021/22.

It's really not backed up by stats though, because you've just arbitrarily decided that the last 6 games are worth measuring as opposed to the previous 11 game unbeaten run that actually produced our current 5th place standing and league consolidation. Another obvious factor your analysis overlooks is that our only other centre forward signed by September 2024 was an enormously overweight mess. Who we then lucked out in getting rid of thanks to the efforts of, err, UK Border and Customs Authority uncovering an *alleged* drug heist. *That* was our squad situation 7-8 months ago when McGinn was signed by the club, but the latter deal is definitely the issue here in hindsight. And finally, the idea that Nathan Shaw is still somehow unfit after countless weeks playing and therefore can't be judged properly just sums up the ludicrous double standards at work here.

Was it a better atmosphere in 2010/2011 for example, when *literally nobody knows what happened now*, or 2005-06 when we folded to Gretna in January and then slid to play-off defeat? Or in 2001 when nobody was in the ground at all? To be clear, I don't actually think the currently excluded group creates a consistently good atmosphere. They'd have a lot of work to do to become the Italian ultras you describe. But the atmosphere wasn't better in their absence - it was just the same as usual. A certain type of game produces an atmosphere, which we got today, but otherwise the Cowshed is mostly a talking shop. That's comparable to any other club as well as any previous golden age. The atmosphere is usually shite.

Pretty sure McGinn was also a used sub when we went 11 league games unbeaten between Falkirk away before Bonfire Night and the TV game a fortnight ago. Perhaps instead of fixating on scapegoats, we should compare some much improved performances from the start and off the bench today compared to last Saturday's across the board. The reality is that we don't have the budget for a credible, deep squad and so whenever a player or two is unavailable, the pressure is on the rest to perform well just to compete in every game at this level. It's the nature of a football fan to be slightly manic-depressive, but we have a squad that is mostly performing to standard and will almost certainly outperform its budget again. To have do better we need to develop the club as a business and/or see an end to the currently unsustainable competition at this level. Neither of which is in the power of either our players or management team to control.

Eh no, we are not Hamilton/Cove. Today only further confirmed that the sun roof is an excellent innovation. Hopefully the dweebs at the insurance company won't insist on a like for like replacement - either a retractable or transparent cover will have us all looking like St. Tropez residents in no time.

Get off your high horse please - there are folk standing up there every week. And if they've bought a season ticket already, the club loses no money at all. They're perfectly entitled to stand outside the ground (it's hardly an equivalent viewpoint anyway) - just as a previous generation of Morton fans did to protest previous ownership decisions. That you don't agree with their arguments or quite clearly their presence at all are really not grounds for police action. A fan-owned club with all our direct competition throwing bad money after bad is not in the position to turn groups of fans away because they rip the knitting of others, or because they don't agree with a club decision. FWIW, I think the club has handled this issue reasonably well - a line was clearly crossed with misbehaviour that had to ve punished - but no one is served by trying to villify those who ended up on the wrong end of that decision acting on their sense of grievance in a completely non-disruptive way. The majority of those outside the ground should in the long term be integrated and brought back in - the lion's share of change to do that will have to come from them of course - but sanctimonious calls for the polis to get involved are not helpful.

Nah, we could do without playing legends blotting their copy book like that (pretty sure both had 'patchy' records in management over in Finland). It'll be a tough act to follow too given the limitations of our budget: so someone like McIndoe is currently who we should have our eye on if/when Imrie gets poached. Seems that they were chaperoned into The Norseman by Mark Pickering after the game though, so they'll no doubt be packing their belongings to move over here for good.

Should we have Lindberg and Rajamaki on at half time every week to inspire comeback wins? Yes, yes we should. Thimk Imrie picked the best lineup to handle Oakley and Main, though I was surprised to see it as he's normally very reluctant to play with a back 3. Crawford (or a similar deep-lying playmaker) is worth a shot with 3 centre backs too, because we really couldn't be putting the initiative on Baird to start our attacking plays. I very much doubt Ayr had any sort of preparation for that either, which is also a bonus. The first half was a patchy performance - some egregious errors on and off the ball, but we also created two very good chances to score and competed reasonably well in all areas. As the second half went on - and in exact opposite to last week - I thought we gained the legs on an Ayr team that had played midweek and produced less and less. Once our subs came on, the Ayr defence struggled to compete physically with them. Another great goal from Blues who is once again the most significant goal threat in the current team. Moffat put in a good shift in a difficult role (Shaw however did not), while all of Davies, Garrity and Keay made big contributions in allowing us to defend from the front. Not to mention the winner. Highlight for me was the new young team behind the Sinclair Street end slating that mercenary Oakley in the build up to the second goal. Award them the assist.

Playing with low confidence after the ball, resulting in lots of wild passes giving it away instead of thinking about it. Shaw has been risible so far.

Very unlikely to happen, but I would add Corr and start with a back 3. Having an extra defender as cover against Oakley and whoever partners him is just common tactical sense: the decision then would be whether to have a third central midfielder or continue with wide players.

In what way? They breached the conditions of entry - en masse - and jeopardised the security of an SPFL match in the process. So where is the sanction for that? When did PC Plod turning up outside their pigeon coop bin of a ground and demanding that Something Must Be Done? Perhaps rather than an 'excuse', what people might have in mind is a degree of consistency. Rather than focusing entirely on a target that certainly isn't doing itself any favours with daft statements, but is also quite convenient for everyone who is old now to get sanctimonious about*. *and yet continue to have songs about the 'MSC' in their accepted repertoire).

Watching Nicky Cadden putting in killer ball after killer ball only makes me more furious about the pathetic offerings of our assorted cast of sand dancers against a crap ten man outfit yesterday.

Then the onus is on the manager to find a slightly different style of play that uses their 'talents'. That's why Imrie deliberately built a larger squad this season, they've all been kept at the club after the January transfer window - now it's time to use them. Honestly, Adeloye plays one fucking game for us and it's suddenly the sky falling down that he isn't available for the next few. That's just football.

1) Yes you are because there is patently no money in the budget to sign anyone, Ally Roy or not, without dragging the season's costs yet further into the red. Your exercise in opportunity cost is therefore relevant because that's how you decide how best to spend money that you actually have in the budget. Throwing extra money from a mystery resource at the first team with the hope of getting better prize money is speculation, nothing more. 2) Our first team squad has more than enough options available now. In the attacking third we have Davies, Reynolds, Garrity, Moffat and McGinn, possibly Crawford too. I may even be forgetting some of our rotating cast. If those players cannot be used in an effective way between them then the vast majority shouldn't be at the club - though it wasn't three weeks ago that we were discussing new contracts pretty much all round. We have a squad here and the onus should be on them to step up.

There's absolutely no guarantee that signing an extra player would yield any higher league placing - see Ally Roy. This entirely bogus 'speculate to accumulate' line of thought is how a club ends up throwing bad money after good and records a larger loss than the one we can already anticipate. Will MCT be able to issue another cash release to bail us out? Furthermore, why have we signed and paid squad players if we cannot possibly cope with three (maximum four) first team players being out at the same time? We're not throwing 16 year olds on the park here - they are all professional and full-time players who have aspirations of starting in their own right. This is their opportunity to step up and if they can't (over the long term - not last night) then they shouldn't stay at the club.

Our aim for the season will be to get 40 points and see what happens from there. Why would promotion play-offs be set as a season aim, when we almost certainly started the season with the 9th largest budget in the division?