TAFKAC

I think I've worked out who you are.

It is very good. I bought my tickets for Kelty and the Stranraer game before I got on the train in London on the Saturday morning. Also used it last week to go and see Ebbsfleet's first game back in the National League.

I thought he was an old man when he was slithering around on the original sites. Crikey he'd have been considerably younger at that point than I am now.

I see your Ed de Ball and raise you Newton....

I find it hard to really hate something that provides so much entertainment and real schadenfreude.

Agreed. The only one of the five I never bought. I liked the light blue away top from 89-91 and the yellow top with the blue diagonal line that I think was 91-92 away top.

Not necessarily. Goodwin currently has the job, so they have been fishing in smaller ponds since McInnes left.

Non league step 6 at the moment, although he's probably got the talent to play slightly higher. He just needs to finish university in June and see what comes next. He was at Bromley until he was 16, but left as they wanted him to change schools for sixth form to take up the 2 year scholarship offer. He'd have had to drop one A level to allow basic full time training, and he made the decision not to as that would have messed up his uni plans. Only one guy from his youth team has gone on to sign for a league club - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ollie_Tanner and that was circuitous. All step 1 clubs are full time, as are a lot at steps 2 and 3. I watch the local step 4 club and those guys are on decent money but train 3 nights a week. It's a completely different beast to non-league up the road. If he was playing Tier 6, where Akinyemi came from, I'd be sending his highlights reel to Dougie....

I think this sums it up perfectly. Particularly the references to Imrie, Ambrose and desperation of the O'Connor signing. We're no longer in that space and bringing in someone who could upset the current equilibrium is not a great use of our limited budgets. Plus, he's failing downwards at the moment. The only person who'd benefit from this is Griffith's agent.

Youth football in England is a strange beast. They hoover up young talent from local clubs and use them to focus on getting the one diamond in each group as close to the first team as possible. In McGinty's case, he was 15 and they poached him from Charlton. Paid £250K and bought his parents a house in Manchester. There were loads of clubs sniffing around him at the time. The problem is that so many players go through academies and loads end up on decent money. But very few actually manage to sustain a full time career in football. He's probably ended up with a better career than others in the Man U youth team he played for. As an example of how daft it is, my lad played at step 6 on the non league ladder last season. He was 20 and his team mates included two that had played at Premiership academies, two that had played at League academies and two who had played in the EFL, including one who had played at the CONCACAF Gold Cup.

Irvine Meadow also beat a Morton XI on Saturday as part of Kilbirnie's pre-season tournament. Have we perhaps got rid of all of the original youth team and replaced them with a new set of 16 and 17 year olds? Down here the National League clubs pick up £3k a player if they put them through 6th form as well as train them. Bromley had enough for four teams last season. National League South and Isthmian League clubs are starting to do it as well - Get a school to agree to teach them and then it becomes the club's "academy". Is there something similar in Scotland?

It was the unironic use of transference that led to the tea being spat out.

No he isn’t. But he did make the L2 version of it.

And scored a cracker to equalise.

fair enough. Both clubs tonight are fairly odious. A bit like deciding who your favourite serial killer is.

I'm confused. Do you genuinely think that Liverpool are more financially doped than Real? I want Real to win tonight, but their finances are a joke. And they were the prime movers behind the super league to avoid sharing revenue with the "little" Spanish clubs.

Didn't Hugo Swire try to make the points about his family's role in the area when he stood for the tories in Inverclyde before getting a nice safe seat from his school chum Cameron?

All board meetings should be minuted. Sharing the minutes with MCT members would start to show a level of transparency, that is currently sadly lacking. As VT says, they will know how to write these to ensure commercial confidentiality.

That takes shoddiness to a new level. And where is the hat that Dougie was wearing at training? One of the few things I'd actually buy.

This sums it completely. No one who is even remotely qualified will consider this role. 30 hours a week to run a Championship football club that needs root and branch reform, with a salary of £30k? I think the advert and the advertised salary have reaffirmed my feeling that this may not end well.

I think this is where I am. I want it to work, but nothing that has happened so far fills me with confidence. At the very least they should have a shadow structure in place ready to take over at handover time. The level of signings and the general level of comms suggests a sense of different blazers, similar attitude.

I've been involved in lots of change programmes. One of the important ways to keep stakeholders on board is to tell them regularly what is going on and be honest when there is nothing new to tell them. It's not rocket science; not being honest and transparent about the reasons for no news allows others to fill the gap with rumour and innuendo.

That's a great bit of writing. Thank you. That thistle game will live long in the memory - I left my house in Warsaw at 6 in the morning to get a flight to Amsterdam to pick up a connecting flight to Glasgow. Got to Glasgow in time to do some shopping for the family and then have lunch with a mate and a couple of pints before the game. Standing in the queue outside Firhill and seeing people I hadn't seen in ages. Getting to the turnstile and having to beg the copper to let me in with the metal coffee cup I'd bought for my wife - he claimed it was potentially offensive, but relented when I showed him my flight tickets. He seemed less concerned with the caramel wafers for the kids. Then 90 minutes of pure tension; always worrying about what Clyde were doing. Absolute joy at the final whistle before trying to rush back to the airport for the flight back. Got home just after midnight. Wouldn't have missed it for anything, but it still doesn't get into my top 3 trips to watch Morton.

Don't often comment on the site for a variety of reasons - main one being I don't see the team as often as I'd like to. I managed three minutes of the video and have to agree with Capitanus. This is not for me. My main concern has always been that is dependent on the GC debt being part of the value of the club. I don't accept that and I would hope that new investors would negotiate it at the very least. I turned off when we got the Dougie tribute version of "we haven't got enough people to make our total, and we don't have a plan in place if we don't make that total. But please ask two friends to invest and we might do it!" At least Dougie only asked us to bring one friend each. The only people I can see benefitting from this is Golden Casket who will reduce their input each year, and watch the debt level reduce. I was stung once by the Trust. That's not going to happen again for me.

Lush were fantastic. A little bit later, but this always made me smile.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSgYHzACvMI