vikingTON

Money explains his signing for Johnstone Burgh now (as well as his last few clubs). A completely overrated 'prospect' in his spell with us regardless and I'm not surprised to see his career wash up in failure.

I don't think he got roasted at all by 'away game at Old Firm' standards. He got booked and didn't win every one on one (who did?) but the number of serious opportunities down our right hand side was limited given the amount of pressure they put on that side of the park. The biggest blow to us today was when they took that ringer 'Sterling' off the park as he was securing our left hand side and gifting us possession every two minutes.

Blues had a tough task today and had players doubling up on his side after the yellow card. He still did fine, especially whenever they tried to switch play. To get through that game on a booking for an hour is worthy of credit. While I'd very much like a natural right back I'm not buying that we'll get found out at Championship level if we can't get one. Blues was our best player playing RB at Ross County in the group. O'Connor has also played well there. If it's a choice between a 'natural' right back like, say, Michael Doyle, or waiting to land a genuine prize like Sir Richard (or any similar quality elsewhere - like Grimshaw last season) later this year then we absolutely should not spend our resources on a second rate option to fill that position. We need a quality and ideally versatile player to improve the squad more than a specialist in any position now.

To update our semi-regular feature of 'Poland: the true laughing stock, diddy league of Europe', Lech Poznan slumped to a second leg defeat and exit in the Conference League to Spartak Trnava from Slovakia last night. A mere 8x smaller neighbour, dishing out a swording to the Poland's top-ranked UEFA crack entrants. Meanwhile a glorified bus stop (stadium capacity: 5,500) is busy representing the country as its league champion from last season, as Poland (40 million+ population) continues to defy all iron laws of demographic and economic scale in professional football.

The incentive to the player is patently obvious - not being held to ransom by a club owner if a desirable offer in terms of club and pay is on the table.

What proportion of Man United fans, or Juventus fans or indeed 'Rangers' or Celtic fans regularly view their matches live and in person? If it will always be a live spectator event, then why are Inter Miami highlights from a tinpot league suddenly swamping media feeds when next to nobody is actually going to travel to Miami to watch a game? The football = live spectator event model is nowhere near as secure now as you claim. There is no reason to assume that it will survive further undermining of that idea without undergoing a complete collapse in the lower levels at least. As for your sustaining revenue by streaming argument - there's no credible model for doing so. GMFC or any other Championship club have a fairly inelastic group of customers - there are not hundreds of millions of people in SE Asia wearing Robbie Crawford jerseys on Saturday nights (although they really should). So if the revenue generated by customer drops by half or even more - bearing in mind that the current market price for streaming a game is zero - then you need double the customer base to avoid losing money overall. It's as unworkable a model as when Albion Rovers or other have tried chucking open the gates for spectators to donate their entrance money - the numbers simply do not add up. It's quite possible that the numbers won't add up in the near future in any case - but a football club would be beyond stupid to directly facilitate that outcome.

The music industry has adapted by pivoting to an emphasis on the 'live event experience', which is why artists are constantly touring now at ever-higher prices. Although the increasing number of festivals folding due to poor ticket sales this summer suggests even that strategy is reaching its limits. People often look sideways at the comparison with cinema or live music but that is precisely the sector that Scottish football is located within. You pay high (sometimes extortionate) entry costs, you are expected to buy crap refreshments within the venue at an enormous markup, everybody involved takes a marginal cut of your cash and then you go home satisfied or not. Those industries might well be fighting a doomed, rearguard action against the hugely disruptive alternative, but they're not actively facilitating their own downfall on the spurious grounds of 'revenue' or widening access.

^^^ verge of tears The Rafa Benitez approved facts that the club was literally at death's door merely 18 months ago; couldn't put a serious squad together this season until it progressed and drew a fortunately lucrative 2nd round cup draw; and still probably won't have more than 4 subs on the bench for the game tomorrow are for some reason more impressive to me than your Benelux-sized sense of entitlement. Scotland is in the grip of an enormous crisis of falling disposable income and massive price inflation across the board. Football fans are being priced out of attending games as a result of clubs' response to their own rising costs. We'll see the reality of that tomorrow and every other week this season. Facilitating the total undercutting of the primary source of income for a football club in this environment is the height of business folly. And as a fan-owned club with no daft sweetie merchant backer any more, GMFC are indeed the canary in the coalmine. When the club can no longer sustain a credible first team squad, I'm sure we'll all be grateful to the overseas subs for allowing us to still afford utter dung like Stefan Milojevic mk. II in the seaside leagues again.

How can 'anyone' - including of course many of the away fans for any given Cappielow match - stream access to the game for next to nothing? What easily removable technological feature allows this coach and horses to be run through the chief revenue-generating model for the club? Be extremely specific in your answer. "So the club are obviously trying to moniterise it by offering an alternative, better quality live stream than you get from the pixelot camera in the Cowshed. Makes perfect business sense, and I'm fairly sure most fans who can afford it will be more than happy to pay for the superior stream offered by the club (notwithstanding the recent issues which seem to have been resolved)." Well no it doesn't because a) the 'higher quality' monetised option quite clearly wasn't actually shitting enough money to retain the original and highly commended commentary for the product, and doesn't actually work reliably. So much for 'higher quality' then, and b) the dozens if not hundreds of Ayr, Raith, Dundee United etc. fans who choose to watch their away game at Cappielow via a shite stream from the comfort of their home this season for zero actual pounds are really not going to feel streamers' remorse at not shelling out £22 to be at the game, or for not having access to an official stream. When the access price to an individual Pixellot stream is literally nothing, the idea that Morton's Goldilocks, 'high quality but, err, here's a refund if it completely fails again' option is fiscally prudent is for the birds.

As above - the issue has got nothing to do with the handful of genuine customers but rather the cart and horses that streaming inevitably runs through the club's primary source of revenue. I don't think that you can reliably gatekeep access to content on the Internet - least of all a football club that can't even get its own website In working order. I've missed multiple seasons while abroad but personally speaking, I wouldn't actually sign up for a streaming service if that happened again (at least not now - 2010 or 2012/13 might have been different). Others feel differently and that's their right but it's hardly an essential service being provided here. Everyone lived in a pre-streaming world not too long ago and engaged as much or as little with the games as they chose when outside of Greenock, every single week. The club has to be hard-headed in comparing all the costs - including lost revenue from matchday fans - to make a serious judgment on its viability. And if it fails that test then it has to go because we're not in a position to carry dead weight. A final point is the hypocrisy at the centre of this issue. We want (and claim) Morton's stream to be a securely provided service to Legitimate Needs Only. But when many Morton fans quite rightly refuse to pay the ridiculous £27 at Tannadice this season, how many will be trawling around at 2:57PM looking for a dodgy stream of the game and pay precisely £0? How many will succeed and pass on the link to others to hook up to? We can't have it both ways here.

So you're claiming that there will be no streams available of Morton home games this season, to anyone who hasn't signed up for the official season ticket?

If you're either too dense or too stubborn to understand how streaming directly impacts gate revenue, sure. A competent business recognises the relationship between the two and calculates a figure at which one form of revenue surpasses the other to make it worthwhile. Thumping in labour cost + equipment cost = phuree money is Rae-esque incompetence. "I'm sure if it didn't, it wouldn't have been continued this season." I don't recall many of last season's games being subject to blanket refunds, so that claim is completely redundant.

Err right, and then it'll get ditched next season as being 'no longer sustainable'.

If it keeps generating literally zero revenue, the service just won't be supplied at all.

Agree and it's good to see Annan continuing to be cultivated as a club we can do business with, hopefully supplanting nearby Border rivals 'Queen of the South' (Ed: double-check weirdo name) in the seaside league pecking order soon.

It's quite obvious that we will have players incoming in the rest of the transfer window. It's also quite obvious that Garrity has no part in a Championship level first team squad yet. Whether he could fill a spot on the bench on Saturday is irrelevant in light of those two facts.

In what alternative universe do you think it hasn't been 'identified as a priority'? If there aren't any good and affordable options available right now though, there aren't any available. Grimshaw didn't sign at the start of August last season. Signing some total haddy just to fill a spot is not the solution. O'Connor is more than capable of playing there so I'd be targeting a LB/CB option if we aren't able to secure a right back at the moment. The problem we have for Saturday underlines that we lack overall cover in defence, as Baird's injury should not be having an impact on two positions at the same time.

Henk van Shite was punted for his hopeless displays on the park and no amount of bullshit cover from Hopkin changes that reality. How many other players that we paid real, actual money for were released due to injury weeks later*? *As opposed to those who should have been released: see Diack, Iain for starters.

It's hardly uncommon for plucky minnows to raise their game for the TV cameras and then to stink the place out during the regular campaign.

Imrie is answering questions about it because Imrie wants to talk about it.

Imrie stated that he'd be happy running with a squad of 18. I don't think that Garrity is really included in that head count though and sub performances have done nothing to suggest that he's equipped for Championship football.

The contribution from Dalrada isn't necessarily identical in Year 2 to what it was in Year 1 though. And I doubt that they were paying for *one year* naming rights to Cappielow regardless of any other ties to the club going forward.

Where to begin with that utter horseshite? The most obvious fail: 1) The Celtic game. This was already accounted for in last season's budget - including the addition of new players at that time, and the club recording a profit for the second time this century. You don't get to count that revenue again this season - that's not how finance works. Ditto the Dalrada investment - only ongoing funding and sponsorship contribute to this season's budget. 2) You point to improvements on the revenue side without even once considering the other side of the coin: an inflationary environment where costs have risen by 10% across the board - and likely much higher for utilities. Simply retaining existing squad players increases costs for the club: they will quite rightly want an increase in their wages based on performance as well as their own bills to pay. The club's balance of income to outgoings is a constantly moving target - the costs do not magically stay the same from one season to the next, least of all right now. 3) 'Back the manager or lose him'. Utter nonsense - the reality is that the club will lose the manager regardless because he is a young, ambitious and clearly effective coach. Imrie is under contract for the foreseeable future though and signed up under conditions that were far more difficult than right now. While Imrie has every right to fight for the needs of the first team squad, we need to ensure that there will be a club years and decades after the current or any other manager has gone - that's the primary goal that GMFC has to ensure, every single year. Which leads us to the logical black hole in your foot-stomping tantrum: what is your causal explanation for the current budget stand-off? Do you believe that the GMFC board are squirrelling money away in illicit offshore accounts? Are they asset strippers looking to run the club into the ground? Why else are they withholding funds that you and others insist are definitely just sitting around waiting to be used on wunderkinds like 'Frankie Deane'?

The only failure here is with the ability to comprehend statistical chance. Given that your principal grounds for complaint is that people will be taking their hard-earned annual leave to make their way to the game rather than on God's given day for football which is a Saturday, the sum total of fixtures in the data set you yourself have defined is 20. That is four seasons of Championship football played on a Friday night x five fixtures on matchday 36 - with an equal chance of being randomly assigned home or away*. That a 6.25% chance (four away games from four) shows up once and once only within that set is not in fact an anomaly as you have stated. It is in fact just about the most probable outcome. Just as if you ran a coin-toss experiment with the exact same sample size, the most probable number of outcomes where four heads were produced from four tosses would be 1. The genuine anomaly would be if 3 or 5 outcomes produced all heads - suggesting a bias within the coin being used. It's really not my fault that the statistics don't support your claim that an anomaly exists where it does not, in the same way that it's not the SPFL's fault that a randomised fixture generator doesn't plug in an AA route map guide from Greenock into its calculation. * The calculations above of course simplified to a degree, because in the case of fixtures each outcome is not fully independent of each other.