wokinginashearerwonderland

I’m sick of hearing our fans claim we have a lot of good players, it’s total nonsense. 8 wins out of 33 games in the league tells its own story. If Ross County make up three points on us in the next four games we would be fighting for our lives at Dingwall in the last game of the season. We are still well and truly in a relegation battle regardless of what anyone says. If third is a realistic target next season (assuming we are still in the top flight) then we only have about four or five in that squad who are at that level, the rest need to be binned. McKenzie, Devlin, Miovski, McGrath and maybe Lopes. The rest should be shown the door. Good luck to this new dude but our fans need to get a grip on the expectation level. We ain’t got some divine right to be at the top end of the league just because we were a good side 40 years ago.

Yeah, as I said in my previous post it depends what your agenda is I suppose. You can dress up the stats to suit. I doubt many people would agree with you that O'Neill's achievement of qualifying for the Euros tops Lennon winning five league titles with Celtic but there you go. You seem to dismiss Lennon because he had a good group of players yet make allowance for some of O'Neill's poor results because he has a young team. He has not been "sensational". I don't think he has massively over achieved with Northern Ireland, but he has done well. Laurie Sanchez beat the likes of Spain and England when he was in charge. O'Neill qualified for the Euros by winning a group that had Romania, Hungary and Finland as the big teams. He then played 4 games at the finals and lost 3. He has had over 80 games in charge now and only Stoke have come calling which for me says a lot. As I said above, I am not against the guy but I think in this country we are far too quick to dismiss and write off others that have won trophies because they are not fashionable names.

Ach, not against O'Neill per se but I don't see what makes his CV any better than someone that has actually won something with a premier league side in Scotland whether that be Callum Davidson, McInnes, Lennon or even Tommy Wright for that matter. It depends what your agenda is regarding any of the candidates. It is probably easier to build a case against appointing O'Neill than it would be to convince someone that he is the best man for the job. He's done ok to a point but even his Ireland record is a pretty mixed bag (3 wins in his 10 games back so far before getting thumped 5-0 tonight) and it was not long ago he was fired by Stoke. It is always difficult to judge someone's body of work with the tools they have at their disposal. How would O'Neill do managing Liverpool and how would Klopp fair managing Northern Ireland, who knows?

That's a major problem though. It is maybe easier said than done but Cormack needs to stop trying to butter up the fans and just be his own man rather than worrying about how popular he is. For example all this crap in his Twitter message about not doing walking away just looks amateurish. Whether people like the idea or not, he is the owner of the club and we are all customers. Just make a proper decision, stick to it and see it out. All this talk about technical directors, next season and transfer windows is fine but we need to get someone in ASAP to stop the club being relegated. We were looking for a manager this time last year so what has happened to the shortlist from then? Ok some of the potential targets may now be in work elsewhere but there must be a few of the names still employable, we should not need to be starting from scratch. It is the same job needing filled as it was a year ago.

There is a subtle difference between someone saying we can beat anyone on our day and a headline writer using that to say we are close to the best teams in Europe and you know exactly what I mean by that. Stitching up their own players is the sort of thing the English Press are famed for, I thought up here in fairness the press normally backed our Scotland players. I suspect if Clarke saw that headline he would be raging.

Loving the headline on the BBC sport page claiming Ryan Porteous said we are not far off the best in Europe. What a bunch of dicks the BBC are. Nothing like trying to do the boy up like a kipper good and proper. I thought they might be trying to back our team not create divisions by taking what he said totally the wrong way.

All this tactical talk on paper is fine, the guy plays 4-2-3-1 nonsense but that is with his current team. You cannot just say that is "his" formation, he will be playing that way because that is the best way to set out he players he has at his disposal at the moment. It might not necessarily be the right way for us to play. If you inherit a squad with 12 centre halves and 1 striker then trying to play four up front is just stupid. And also, what is a 4-2-3-1? They are just numbers. If the 3 behind the striker are Overmars, Kanchelskis and Zidane you get a helluva different team than if the three are Modric, Iniesta and De Bruyne. Exactly the same with this three at the back talk. Rico, says in his post that three at the back is a pretty pragmatic way to play in Scotland. Well Man City play three at the back quite a bit and it is anything but pragmatic. It depends how you deploy your players not what equation you come up with when you chuck the names into a formation.

I think we are getting hugely above our station in the footballing world because everyone is spending too much time looking at what goes down in England. There are certainly more add ons to running our club now than in years gone by but at the same time, we are not Real Madrid or Man Utd. We play (usually) one game a week and if things are being done properly we need to recruit maybe half a dozen players each season. This begs the question what on earth would a technical director, a director of football and a recruitment director do for 40 hours a week? It might sound simplistic but if you have a competent Chief Executive which I am assuming Burrows is, a few decent scouts plus the manager and his assistant then surely that is enough to identify who we want to sign, to complete the transfer process and to put a team out on the park at the weekend. I would be pretty confident that you could fire the director of football, the head of recruitment, get rid of the sports science and employ a steady Eddie old school type manager who knows the Scottish game and we would be higher up the league than we are at the moment. I just don't think you need all these people.

Apparently Cormack has agreed with McInnes that he can get the job again if he loses on Saturday

A lot of massively over the top knee jerk reactions on here as usual to how things have been going under Warnock. Give the guy a chance. He just got off the flight before the Rangers match so it's hard to even count that one. Since then it's been W-D-D-L, hardly a crisis but the guy does not have a magic wand either. I totally agree with his comments at the weekend, we do have a team full of fannies that need to get stuck in and win the battle. Against Levein's St Johnstone it is sure to be another physical encounter which is something you need to be able to cope with in this league and always has been. Being 5 points off second bottom means playing pretty football is not an option, we need points any way we can and I can see this being the night we get them. 2-0 Gartenmann, Duk

No, why would you stop the game when the ball goes out of play? The ref doesn’t do that at the moment, it would only stop for the same reasons that time gets added on at the moment namely injuries and where people take a ridiculous time to make a substitution. It would just give the fans, both in the stadium and watching on television a better understanding of how long was actually left. The only person at the moment who knows how long is left is the referee which doesn’t happen in any other sport. The ref often gets grief from managers and players at the end for adding/not adding time and just having a visible clock for all to see would take all of that away.

Jes Rico, as usual you are massively overcomplicating fitba. All I was meaning was that if an offside decision is so marginal that we are needing a computer to decide for us then we should be giving the benefit of the doubt to the striker which is what was the case before. Most games now have enough cameras to give an angle which gives a decent view albeit it may not be perfectly in line. Just look at a couple of TV replays and make a judgement, that’s basically my point. You’re asking why would that be better than a linesman looking at it? The reason being that the very nature and pace of the game means it is almost impossible to look at both the ball being kicked and the guy about to receive it at the same time whereas with a still image you can. I don’t think any of us want to see goals being disallowed because a computer has determined that the striker is a millimetre offside.

The other issue bugging me is the time added on. If we just stopped the clock when there was an injury everyone in the stadium would know how long there was left.

I’m not sure why we are needing to be drawing lines at all to be honest. Offsides and penalties are the worst bit about VAR. Why the VAR ref cannot just look at the picture and use his brain to say “he looks level with the defender therefore goal” I can’t quite understand. Instead we are disallowing goals that look very, very marginal. All the line drawing does is give more ammunition to the conspiracy theorists amongst us.

He’s not a fashionable name which is what it comes down to. As a comparison, I see Jon Dahl Tomasson has just left Blackburn with them sitting 18th in the English Championship. I am guessing half of our support would back him to be our next manager based on the fact he once beat Rangers and is foreign.

Why are you concentrating on his record in the English Premier League Jute? I don’t see why that is relevant at all? If anything, the standard/style of our football up here is more akin to the lower leagues in England anyway. You’re being incredibly harsh on the guy. His stints in the top flight have been managing the likes of Sheffield United and QPR where you are always going to be fighting against the odds, he’s hardly going to have similar stats to Fergie, Wenger and Klopp. He didn’t exactly have the luxury of Henry and Cantona in his teams.

It is a left field appointment but to be honest I would rather have an experienced guy like Warnock in charge for the rest of the season than Barry Robson, who just did not know what he was doing. Whatever anyone thinks about Warnock, he has been a manager for 2000 odd games for a reason, he is competent manager, you don't get to that many games by luck or coincidence. I have never understood people who disregard managers because of their age, it is a total nonsense. I have heard people say that about Mourinho, oh he's a dinosaur and all that rubbish. Experience is the one thing you cannot buy. In my opinion managers get better as they get older because they have had time to learn from their earlier mistakes. The point that stood out for me from his press conference is when he said 90-95% of being a manager is man management and the more I watch this stupid game the more I buy into that by seeing how some players turn it on under one manager but not for another. I reckon Warnock is the type of guy that players will run through a brick wall for. Happy to give the guy a chance. The worst that can happen is we get pumped in the cup and finish 10th in the league which is how things were looking they would pan out under Robson anyway. If the guy was Swedish the majority of our support would be thinking this was a masterstroke.

Robson/our recruitment team must be watching the wrong team. We don't need defenders. The Celtic games aside, we have conceded 23 goals in 18 games but in those same 18 games we have scored just 22. We need people to create and score goals. The defence and goalie ain't really that bad.

Interesting point actually, Rico as to whether you would ever want to see your team lose. I can see the argument by those who say give Robson until the end of the season. My concern would be, if we happen to have a decent end to the season then presumably we are stuck with the same guy for next season and with the best will in the world I don't think any of us reckon he is good enough. There is always an element of luck involved in appointing a manager. In Milne's time as chairman, a lot of the managerial appointments may not have worked but you could kind of see the basis behind why he might have given them the job in the first place. Eg. someone like Alex Miller had done well at Hibs and won a trophy, Steve Paterson had been successful at Caley albeit it didn't work out at Pittodrie. With Cormack, I don't know which hat he would used to pull out the names of Glass, Goodwin or Robson because none of those would even have been in my top 20 candidates for the job. I think with each of these names, most of our fans were looking forward more in hope than in expectation that their tenure as boss would be successful. We have created a problem for ourselves in that if we dispense with Robson, we are getting into the cycle of ditching managers every 18 months which is not great. The issue is, until we appoint someone with a decent track record in the first place I think this is going to keep happening.

MASSIVE opportunity the Scottish Cup presents us this season. Drawing Clyde and Bonnyrigg means we effectively have to win three proper games to lift a trophy. We've only won 13 domestic cups in 121 years, we should be chucking all our in eggs in one basket for this competition, you don't get any trophies for finishing third in the league.

Toni Coom By Yah

Wow! Big blow to the North East. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-67918029

Has to be said, there is much more love for Ferguson now that he is playing in Italy than there ever was when he was actually our player.

Play in the Championship next season

The guy’s 12 points clear of us with a fraction of the budget we have, it’s a no brainer. We moved on because he had virtually no financial backing from Cormack, nothing close to what those following him have had.