EanieMeany

Quite. Again, my argument here isn’t that Waters would be a bad or unreliable option, I’ve said before I’d be happy enough if he’s here next season; it’s only that I wouldn’t be in a particular rush to secure his signature at this juncture. If that’s how it is and he’ll be signing on, then so be it, the position won’t be a cause for concern with him in it; if it’s not him then chances are somebody comparable or better might come up. I don’t think it’s an outlandish suggestion that that could be the case as again, Waters is here because he’s what was available at the start of February - a time when options are limited - when we were forced into getting somebody in, and I’m not sure he’s been so impressive that he merits moving quickly for, and certainly not so much that punting Strapp for him is justifiable; it’s entirely possible that other, better options could present themselves over time rather than rushing into signing Waters up, and also unlikely that there’s going to be a huge queue of more illustrious suitors after him that would force your hand on the issue.

I wouldn’t be opposed to Waters being here next season by any means, to be clear, he’s an alright full-back; I just don’t necessarily think he’s shown that much quality or contributed so significantly to the team that it would be essential to get him signed up early, even without considering the comparison to Strapp. It won’t be bad news if he does indeed get kept on, by any means. With Strapp in mind though, we’re letting a much, much better player go without as much as a token offer for reasons that aren’t at all clear and (if Waters has indeed been provisionally offered a deal), don’t seem to be fully assessing the options to ensure the downgrade is as minimal as possible (Waters was a shrewd acquisition but he was also the available option when we were forced into bringing somebody in), and it’s also worth bearing in mind the right-back is almost certainly going to be a big step down from Grimshaw. It was always likely both he and Strapp would leave, of course, and that the replacements would be lesser players, but that just makes it all the more important you get the best replacements given how important those two were, and the authority they carry on the pitch and exert upon opponents. Again, Waters isn’t a bad player by any means, but good enough when we’ll also be without Grimshaw’s presence on the other side? If the right-back was the same level as him? I’m not so sure about that, but only time will tell.

Agreed on the first part, and to be honest I'm not sure Waters is quite good enough that his signing should be rushed into, especially when we're apparently just casting Strapp off. We could get worse, for sure, but I don't think it'd be impossible to get somebody a bit better. Either way, no point dwelling too much on it in this thread for now, we'll see what happens over the summer. Can't agree on the second part though. If we were in the same league as St Mirren then aye, maybe the Renfrewshire Cup games wouldn't be entirely necessary, but when we're not then I think they should definitely be played: they're far more interesting than some plodding friendly, they give a wee bit of a competitive edge ahead of the season starting and are a good way to get new players in tune with the club. It's also an extra few bob in ticket money, which ain't to be sniffed at. Derbies are so much better when there's hate figures and pantomime villains on both sides too, so annual meetings would allow them to develop a wee bit and help keep the rivalry fresh (especially for younger fans) rather than just something that used to happen. We still remember the likes of the Maisano brothers at Love Street, Reece Hands scream at their new dive, or Cham having an out-of-body experience as a footballer there too; I doubt many people can even remember who we've played in pre-season in recent years never mind specific moments like the ones there's been against St. Mirren. It's a no-brainer to reintroduce the Renfrewshire Cup, imo, and it's overdue.

There’s actually been some really smart Joma kits recently (their Villarreal centenary strip is an absolute beauty and would make a great Morton away one), so I’m more optimistic about what they might offer than I was to begin…but even at that, I agree, you just can’t whack the glorious invention of the Matchwinner era (unless we get Umbro involved, which should also definitely happen at some point). Football strips are so often really bland and boring these days, even things that ostensibly have an unusual design still end up looking flat and lifeless with the way it’s just printed on; I’d love to see us have a few 90’s style numbers with the level of detail in the material etc you got with those. Bring back chevrons and tiger stripes and weird green and white and black striped creations, I say. Also, it’s just occurred to me that of all the great Matchwinner strips, there wasn’t really any hooped ones. Not a complaint at all, the opposite really: if you deviate from the traditional style and nobody really notices, you’re doing something right.

Matchwinner trackies > play-offs*. The lack of decent leisurewear (as opposed to the generic training stuff with a badge stuck on) has long been a big hole in Morton's commercial offering - the only decent trackie I can think of was a Bukta one - so the prospect of Matchwinner stuff is a cracking development. *Maybe.

There’s obviously (well, presumably) been a lot of legal hoops to jump through regarding the ticketing situation, but it’s great news to finally have it sorted. Well done to the club for doing so.

More likely that that fanny O’Ware is just desperate for a bit of attention.

Lovely stuff.

Absolutely disgusting that one of those peasant outfits from Ayr and Grangemouth are going to be going to Hampden.

Agreed, it really has been excellent and it seems a team effort too although Gareth who does the socials has obviously made a huge difference since taking over. It's only a small thing, but the wee video of Dougie before the Partick game really helped make me feel it was a big game, and that we're right in this league for real - again, it's a small thing, but getting those right are what really makes the difference rather than just the odd picture of ticket prices or whatever. On a slight downside, I do hope the website can get rectified at some point. It could do with a proper revamp rather than the half-arsed botch job under the previous regime.

Raymond "Ray" McKinnon has been appointed as the new manager of Forfar, who currently sit bottom of the third division. Nothing against Forfar, I tended to quite enjoy the away trips up there back in the day, but it's gonnae be really fuckin funny watching that prick take a club right out the SPFL.

Tickled by Falkirk tweeting about their victory over "higher level opposition" after beating Maryhill minnows Partick. Poor wee Falkirk, languishing in the third tier, eh. Get it up them.

Aye, I'll hold my hands up to that after reading it all over again. Fair's fair. Nonetheless, I do find it all a bit vague, and I'll always be wary of anything that chucks about a load of buzz words and jargon over actual detail tbh (modernising the social media output, for example: what exactly does that even mean?), and indeed anyone who buys influence in a club on unspecified terms. Anyway, I think it'll genuinely be interesting to see what exactly is involved with this as it seems to be going a beyond a simple sponsorship deal, to find out what the plan is regarding Dalrada's involvement and input, how far the money will go and ultimately how it all relates to the million and one questions there already are regarding how things are currently going. An injection of an unspecified amount of money doesn't necessarily mean it's going to radically alter the picture apart from kicking the current can of woes down the road. There's no question this could potentially be very good, but it could also potentially not be good at all, and again I'm not particularly confident in either the club or the MCT boards' abilities to a) make the right choices and b) avoid being taken for mugs: see their initial acceptance of Crawford's "we'll keep the ground" scam. Again, the real worth of this will come in the details, not just the press release PR statement.

The money has bought a seat on the board though, and it would appear potentially a degree of influence on how the club is run although the extent of that isn’t particularly clear. That surely goes beyond the normal remit of a sponsorship agreement, does it not? I doubt many people would have been overly chuffed if the Easdales was granted those privileges off the back of sponsoring the strips.

Golden Casket donated Millions. Sorry

Yes, this is what I find a bit strange. When it was people effectively leasing shares with little obvious influence or involvement with the club being proposed, it was put to an EGM and we were told there would be a vote on all and any deals, and subsequently that anonymity was a deal-breaker. Now we have what appears to be a significantly greater intervention in the club and its activities and it’s simply presented as a fait accompli. There’s a clear discrepancy there, and once again not much in the way of significant detail regarding what the package actually is. If we weren’t to implicitly trust people simply donating money for shares, what’s different here? It’s very reasonable to wonder what the framework is here, which is very different from casting doubts upon it. Nobody at the club or MCT, far less a third party, has remotely earned implicit trust in their decision-making, to be blunt. I’m not saying there’s anything dodgy about Dalrada or this deal, but the double-standard is clear and once again leaves the chain of accountability between club and owner seeming to be extremely malleable/non-existent.

I’m more interested in what all of this actually means in practise, tbh. It all seems a bit vague but the talk of reducing carbon footprints etc kinda sounds like the day to day work of the club might be being handed over given all the talk of energy bills and what not. It seems, for good or ill, that this is a variation on the share sales proposal but skipping the bit about fan votes or consultation. The money is certainly welcome but it remains to be seen what the test entails of.

“Cappielow Park supported by Dalrada Technology UK”. Good god.

I actually don't think it's too much of a surprise, to be honest. I never really got the impression that playing football was really quite his thing, so far as the dedication to be a professional goes - I don't think he was lazy or unprofessional or anything but for some reason it just always struck me that he was one of these guys just doing it as a job that he happened to be half decent at rather than because it's his purpose in life. If he was an eyes-on-the-prize, all-in type, chances are he'd have found himself a wee bit further up the food chain. Nothing particularly wrong with that, to be fair, there's plenty of players in that category but it doesn't surprise me that Fjortoft's decided to go and do something else. He was alright for us and seems a decent guy so good luck to him.

Yeah, I agree with this. I think there's real value in programmes in a lot of ways and costing a club money to produce is not inherently a good enough reason to stop making them. It could be, but not as a first resort. Aside from anything else, they're a source of income and if you're skint, the sensible thing is to explore all options for maximising it before even considering scrapping it. I suspect even just saying "here, gonnae start buying these to raise money" would have saw sales increase, tbh. Once again, it's not just the surface thing that's the problem here, it's what it represents. Could well be, yeah, but I really don't think it's a great idea for a director (MCT director?) to be shouting about something like that on such a platform and seeming to do so with his official hat, so to speak, on at a time when it's blatantly obvious there's big problems behind the scenes. If anyone at the club or MCT wants to discuss that idea from their position within either (if the post in question had simply been a personal one rather than stating it was a view from an official position, then fair doos obviously), they should be doing it via the MCT membership. As for hospitality, just scrap it. If hardly anybody wants to use it, then there's no need to keep doing it, is there? No, didn't think so.

Wondered how long it'd be before we got something like this. Perhaps I'm being too unkind, but I find that hard to take particularly seriously tbh: I don't really see this is about "communication" so much as a totally dysfunctional, unaccountable board repeatedly making a cunt of a thing then backtracking on it when an apparently unforeseen negative reaction occurs. The big test of the viability of MCT will come in whether its membership allows this to carry on, or demonstrate the power of the organisation by forcing a significant review of just what exactly is going on inside Cappielow. If it turns out the purpose of MCT is simply to hand Gordon Ritchie his own football club to play with, nobody can have any complaints when it ends badly or with the club in the hands of a private owner.

Aye, it’s not really convincing that it’s an entirely unviable endeavour now but I don’t believe for a minute that it was the case “a long time ago” (presuming this means pre-smart phone) even with free printing, and that nearly every other club in the country and beyond has been flinging money into a black hole from day dot. I think at some point over the last few decades, somebody somewhere might have raised the discussion if that was remotely true tbh, and even today it’s hard to imagine clubs like Broxburn are cheerfully chucking money away on programmes with gay abandon.

Potentially reasonable, I'd say, but like with everything else there's no real reasoning offered and the way its communicated doesn't really give you much faith in what's happening. All of these things happening together are painting a very bleak picture, and let's be honest here: had a new "private" owner taken over last summer and oversaw the last few months, the name Hugh Scott would have been getting floated around regularly and let's not pretend otherwise. I'm not suggesting there's any deliberate intent to harm the club, but that's not the only thing that can damage one and none of this sits right at all a: there's been alarm bells ringing for a while now and they're just getting louder. We've even had a director shouting about moving kick-off times to earlier in the afternoon to avoid using the floodlights, ffs*. I think if those who believe in the MCT project as a concept are serious about it, it'd be a good time to demonstrate it's accountability and potential for change. As for programmes, it's a bit of a shame to see "I don't buy them, so I don't care" getting wheeled out here tbh. Plenty of people do value programmes, there'll be folk who've collected them all their lives etc so whilst times do move on and it may be programmes will become a thing of the past in the near future, they should not simply be scrapped without bothering with some sort of fan engagement. It's part of the broader matchday "experience". Also, with advertising as well as sales its a source of income that shouldn't be getting discarded so easily; I find it hard to believe that matchday programmes are an inherently unviable product when far smaller clubs than Morton seem to be able to produce them without any problem. As I said before, this is precisely the kind of issue where involving the MCT membership would be really useful, and there's a number of different options that could be explored such as (as you said) a monthly publication or even changes to the current format to refresh the offering. If this was an isolated matter, it might be less remarkable, but it's not: it's the latest in a line of examples of an organisation which seems to have no answers other than to just swing the axe left, right and centre and then make noises about loans or ask for more money from its customers who are already paying way, way over the odds. In that context, it very much is significant. **Sam Robinson on LinkedIn.

Surely this is exactly the kind of thing that should have been put to the MCT membership over the summer to discuss how to proceed, to explore digital options or to see what features would encourage more sales etc? There’s loads of people that collect programmes and again, they’re a match-day staple at clubs of all levels. (Incidentally, they had sold out of the Cup centenary ones about 20 mins before kick-off, just as an aside. Hard to grumble if you can’t cope with a predictably higher demand when it comes along.) It’s just nonsense for some unknown and seemingly unaccountable figure to be deciding stuff like this on a whim and not even informing anybody about it until a couple of hours before kick-off. If the Raes had overseen this summer, everybody would be going mental about it - much of what’s happened is potentially justifiable but when it’s a whole stream of things, big and small, with no real explanation whatsoever, it just screams of a club in a seriously bad way and being ran into the ground.

Christ almighty. It may be that there’s good justification for this but ffs, programmes are a footballing institution and just so off-handedly saying you’re not bothering your arse is a really stinking look.