Toby

Jack Harkness’s Morton career wasn’t terribly distinguished.

Tedious dirge, but fair play to Dunning for not being bored into submission.

Looking forward to seeing that head steward trying to justify her existence for half an hour before kick off tonight by trying to find a swastika on each of these.

I wasn’t too pleased to hear about his response to one fan’s grumbles about Arbroath away in December, but that’s his battle to fight. Doesn’t leave a good impression in my eye though. And after I emailed the club over my mate that supports Dundee United being denied entry a month ago, addressing the mail to him, my pal received a refund, but no explanation or apology for what happened. I’d also have expected some sort of reaction to the “alleged” racism incident at the weekend, which I don’t accept they’re unaware of. He seems big on communication when the positives can be played upon, but I’m not seeing much evidence of solving real concerns. I don’t really care how many e-learning modules office staff are completing when the General Manager doesn’t have the courtesy to reply to a relevant complaint.

Am I the only member of the Morton support who isn’t actually that impressed with your man, Dale?

An utterly appalling afternoon in just about every way. I'm sick of being told how great Alan Power is when he's giving away soft goals like that first one and Brian Graham's at Firhill the other week. Same applies to Broadfoot- we've really got to look at lowering the average age of the squad in the summer- relying on guys who simply don't have any pace has been our Achilles heel all season. The downgrade that Waters is on Strapp has also been stark. He's like a 12 year old playing in an under 18's game. Three touches to control the ball and by that point the best pressing team in the division are all over him like a rash. I'll not even start on French on the other side. Ross's post above says more than any diatribe from me could. Quitongo was good- but we're too far down the road now to be giving him a new contract so he can sit on the treatment table all next season, that ship's sailed. Even the shite nature of our goal summed up how crap an afternoon it was. And last, but most certainly not least- absolutely disgusting to hear some racist fuckwit screaming not once, but twice, when Todorov was announced as man of the match over the tannoy that he was a "fucking refugee". I suppose I'm at fault like everyone else for not challenging him at the time, but having done that all the way back in 2006 when some wanker gave Marvin Andrews some of the same and having my ankles clipped walking out of grounds for a year or two afterwards I vowed I never would again, and don't blame anyone else for not wanting the hassle. But it can't go without comment. Hope the insufferable prick is proud of himself- or more to the point, I hope he's absolutely shiting himself if the club take a look at this forum and investigate. Dickhead.

I don't think it’s petty at all. Announcing that we’ll be herded into a cramped section of an old stand which for many will have a restricted view of the Railway End is hardly an incentive to sell as many tickets as possible. Why would folk want to do that instead of stand in relative comfort and mingle with their mates behind the goal? That said though, we can hardly ask Morton to stick up for us, here. They do similar to clubs like Ayr more often than not, making Cappielow a pretty miserable away trip. No wonder the club did fuck all over the Arbroath fiasco at Christmas time, they didn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s about time clubs got together and agreed a strategy on how to make away trips as good an experience as possible across the board, but as discussed in the thread I started in December, the clubs don’t care about away fans, and as such, their own fans suffer when travelling away. Rinse and repeat.

Agreed. Inverness are a club whose success has been built on sand and who, it shouldn’t be forgotten were given a lot of help in their formative years and are the bastard spawn of two perfectly good Highland League clubs that were killed off for a vanity project. Throw in the eye-watering losses and the trail of destruction being left by their concert company and there’s no sympathy here. For all the success they had, there’s no real honour to it, and I can only hope that the years of lavish spending and doing things on tick is finally coming home to roost. This wasn’t a sugar daddy throwing his own money at a club, it was a club accumulating debt it had no intention of repaying. My ideal scenario this season would have been Inverness and Queen’s Park to go down, and with Falkirk back next year, I’ll obviously be wanting them down immediately, but Queen’s Park’s time can wait for now. The Fridge Mhagnate will get bored soon enough, let’s see Inverness down, finding their level and battling to stave off liquidation on the back of a 463 crowd for a game against Rothes.

Fuck that. My pals from the Scotland games support Arbroath, I want us to have the honour of burying them.

Good luck to him in retirement. A good man who was given quite a baptism of fire in his first job working for that bastard. And thanks for bringing Harry Curran to Morton.

Good to see Wales getting knocked out. I fucking hate Wales.

I wonder if the unforeseen circumstances surrounding the rescheduling of the AGM were that the notice was provided to shareholders on 19th March, which is less than the required 14 days notice required for a 28th March meeting. I may be wrong, as my knowledge of company law is somewhat limited, but I believe the new date of the AGM now falls out with the required ten month timescale from the date of the accounts, which would have been 31st May 2023.

*Not proven.

Throw in a potential, but unlikely play-off campaign which in the best case scenario could stretch to six games that aren’t on the season ticket and then take into consideration that this is the first summer in a generation that a lot of the support are keeping every penny for a trip to a major tournament and I can see the club forced into a bit of an embarrassing climb-down on this. These things aren’t really my scene now I’m a bit older, and I didn’t attend last year but that event seemed quite popular with a lot of the support- although I seem to recall criticising the price at the time. I saw someone saying the price has doubled this year! If it was a free bar you could maybe understand, but it doesn’t sit easy that a fan-owned club is pricing out the rank-and-file for what should night of mutual appreciation for everyone’s efforts.

Aye, there couldn’t have been enough weans standing at the front of the Sinclair Street end yesterday to keep them busy.

So far as I made out, they hadn’t played with the stewards that the message on it wasn’t offensive and asked permission to display it. You’ll just about make out from my photo that there’s a skull with a couple of crossed swords, and the badges of Reggiana and Morton. Really nothing to get bothered about in the slightest, whlie they were nowhere to be seen as the pyro was getting set off against Hearts the other week (not that I really object to the young team using that). It was a mountain out of a molehill. I get that it might appear that I’m probably over-egging the significance of this, but I think it’s important that every minor issue is raised on here, so as to provide an easy reference point of all the security company’s failings and wrong-doings.

There was more of this yesterday, and hardly a coincidence that it comes a couple of days after the General Manager admits to having a tense discussion with the security company. No point in smiling, waving folk off and wishing them a happy weekend when she’ll be behaving like a little Hitler next week because it’s ingrained in her and she can’t help herself. Just own your behaviour and get a job that you’re more suited to- i.e. one that doesn’t involve working with the general public. That’s the positives though. The negative was their stupid insistence on giving the visiting Reggiana fans who turned up for the first time in a good while a hard time for putting up a flag that was no more than 2x3ft in size up. Bureaucracy over common sense as usual. You’d think most football clubs would welcome visitors like them with open arms, yet at Cappielow you’ve got guys on radios making a fuss about the most trivial issues when they should in fact be there to make the experience of going to a football match as pleasant as they can for paying customers.

A lot of boys probably still over in Amsterdam for the Scotland game, in fairness.

While you do in theory have to provide the same discount for away fans, that’s where multi-game offers are the way forward, and to be fair to the club, they did offer this for the four games from Airdrie until next week’s game against Queen’s Park. My only criticism of that would be that the Airdrie game came just before the end of the month, when many folk are typically paid, so shelling out £70-odd for a modest discount just before your wages come in isn’t always ideal. Doing a monthly deal might be an idea- if there are two home games in a month, offer a £40 ticket and if there are three do one for £60.

Can’t say I’m not disappointed with the club’s lack of a response to my complaint about this. I’ve not spoken to my mate since the weekend, but to my knowledge he’s not heard anything from the club beyond his refund, which I assume he received. And given that the complaint came from myself, neither have I since the admin boy, Alistair told me he had passed on my complaint to the General Manager. I don’t think that just giving a refund with no explanation or apology to my pal, or reassurance to me that an investigation is taking place is enough, to be honest. I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt for not replying immediately because everyone inside the club would have been busy in the lead up to the Hearts game, but hearing nothing two weeks after making a valid complaint, and a week and a half after the big event that consumed their focus is poor.

Big game for San Marino against St. Kitts and Nevis in Serravalle this evening. Tonight’s the night.

Allan Moore takes over as manager of Camelon Juniors.

*Ex-councillor.

The only possible justification I can think of (and this is a real stretch) is that the away turnstiles at the WDE were closed, so he had to turn up at the main stand entrance, so as an away fan, would (not really) have needed escorting up the stairs and through an empty corridor to the away end of the main stand, which would have required taking a steward from their position. We are, of course talking about escorting a middle aged man who has paid a not inconsiderable sum of money to be entertained, not a Category A prisoner. Unfortunately for the head steward though, things come up and now and again you have to juggle your pack. It’s called management, something she’s clearly not capable of, or not prepared to do. So instead of opening the gate and inconveniencing one or a couple of her team for the best part of three minutes, she’s cost the club his £22 entry fee, upset both him and a regular Morton fan with her conduct, given the club’s admin staff and General Manager a headache to appease said upset fans, and seen the tale dragged onto social media. I hope it was worth it.

It’s a bit of a nuisance to quote and reply to everyone on this, but I just can’t accept the point about reporting the ground at a certain percentage of capacity at a certain point after kick off. We’re well past the stage of folk turning up on the day and handing over £20 and walking through now. Every purchased ticket is recorded and the club know how many people at a maximum will be in the ground at kick off time going by those sales, with stewarding numbers arranged in advance. I remember Dave MacKinnon telling me of similar instances of people who were knocked back, if turning up late from work, when he made his grovelling apology over his (alleged) drunken blocking me from the club’s Twitter, and telling me they were working on fixing it, yet four years down the line, and under a more efficient management structure, we’re at the same place with the same security firm. Ronnie’s point about picking on easy targets strikes a chord here, for me. Like they’re happy to pick on a grandfather and his grandson instead of getting right in the middle of the shed at its most wild, they’ve found an away fan that they think will eventually forget about the issue and move on, not knowing that his mate is in fact a Morton fan who will cling onto this like a dug with a bone. I’d expect if questioned, the first defence to be that he was drunk. He wasn’t, I met him outside the Norseman at full time, by which point he’d had plenty of unexpected time in the boozer and was completely sober. Ironically, reading Paul’s post- the guy is a medical professional, who has before found himself in situations similar to what Paul’s painted at games elsewhere, forcing him to turn up later, and been admitted. You wouldn’t know to look at him, though. Not that the head steward did, of course. She denied him admission from the other end of a walkie-talkie, leaving her subordinate to confront him, like the coward she is. With my pal included in my email trail, we received a reply from Alistair, who asked for his details to process the refund and advising that it had been forwarded to Dale. Given that I addressed the original mail to Dale and asked for his thoughts on the matter, I’m a bit disappointed that having sent it on Wednesday night, I’ve not heard a thing from him. While I feel that addressing the treatment of wronged customers should be a matter that’s treated with the utmost priority, I’m prepared to give the benefit of the doubt for now, given how busy a week this is with the Hearts game coming up, but Morton have got two extremely unhappy paying customers, here. And one of them is a very regular one. The tail is wagging the dog with this security firm, and Morton really have to be letting them know that their behaviour, and that of certain individual employees, can’t go on as it is.