wokinginashearerwonderland

I think we have to be a bit more positive in the approach in this match and go for the win if we want to qualify. The Greeks are decent so the away fixture will be very tough. Lob Dykes and Adams up front and push for the win.

Decent side. If half of those had been in our first team of late maybe we would be off the bottom of the league.

The idea of going from Martin to Dyche is mental, polar opposites. That is going from new age tippy tappy goalies playing fitba shite to old school get in aboot them and fire it forward to the big man stuff. That really is the prime example of ripping up the game plan if that happens.

That's good..........and also quite shite at the same time. Assuming I am right, that means based on chances created, you would have expected us to score 2-3 goals in the first half? That is the first time ANY side in the SPL has created 3 really good goal scoring chances in the last 11 years . Mental. xG is a funny stat. Who decides what is a chance that someone should score? If you are four yards out and you are Lewandowski, that is an expected goal, if the same chance falls to Keskinen it ain't really an expected goal. Would be awfully surprised if that happened. Even a diehard hun would be mad to swap Hearts for Rangers right now. If all the Tony Bloom hype is to be believed, Tynecastle would be a far better option.

Got to disagree. As someone who cannot remember anyone bar Celtic or Rangers ever winning our league I would cheer on any other side who could possibly make a challenge.

This is the glamour match of the tournament and the reason that you strive to qualify for Europe. Therefore, for me, it ranks above Dundee in importance. I would be pretty cheesed off as a punter, paying £32 for a ticket for this one,to see us write it off or be saving any players for the weekend. Just have a proper go and see what happens. It would be a tough ask to expect us to be beating this lot however I don’t think we should just be accepting of a thrashing either. We are on our own patch with home backing and no reason to think that we cannot compete. The away fixtures are likely to be extremely tough to take anything from and therefore it is important to try to get anything from the home matches to stand a chance of going through. It might be one of those nights where a more traditional Scottish approach could be the way to go. Play with a high tempo, be a bit more direct, get the ball into the box and see what transpires.

No, I am just using the eye test to make judgement on where we are at. You are harping back to a draw with Celtic almost a year ago as one of the reasons to be keeping this bloke in a job which is clutching at straws. The last 40 games have been garbage. We have a massive financial advantage over about 7 of the other teams in this league. After 60 games in charge Thelin has us in a worse predicament than we were in before he arrived. I just think he has had a fair crack of the whip and it is not working and at some point the club has to have the balls to admit that.

The cup win was great but it papered over the cracks. We parked the bus and barely got a kick in that game, Schmeichel threw in the equalising goal and we took some great penalties. The rest has been incredibly underwhelming. We beat Rangers, great, we also lost to them 3-0 and 4-0. Things have become so shit that you are celebrating a 2-2 draw with Celtic yet they also humped us 6(six)-0, 5-1 and then their reserves beat us 5-1 again at the end of the season. We even lost 4-0 to Kilmarnock last season! Moving on to this season, we are 2 months in, out of 2 cups, and not scored a league goal. I guess we will agree to disagree but I think you are mental to suggest this guy is making any kind of progress. On to Thursday night and it is likely to just be another case of how many we will lose by.

Absolutely agree 100%......but what have you seen in the last year to suggest he deserves more time ain't inept?

I don't disagree with that OrlandoDon but that is just modern football. Players don't stick around long now and squads turn over very quickly. In the last few seasons we have had to significantly change the squad, it is just how modern football works and is going to be the same going forward. It's also partly Thelin's own doing that the squad has changed so much. We have shipped out a lot of players that we could have held onto that are no worse that the new ones we have signed. I'm thinking MacKenzie, Rubezic, Morris, Sokler, McGrath, Gueye to name a few. We did stupid things like buying Jensen when our right back was at the time our best player. The 3 year thing is just nonsense. He came here inheriting a squad that had just finished 6th the season before and a strong 6th (if you get such a thing). Are we suggesting it should take 3 years to be turning that around to be challenging to finish in the top 4? Thelin has spent a small fortune compared to those before him. If you want to make a comparison, Hearts finished 6th last season, brought in a new manager 4 months ago and look streets ahead of us. The problem is if you give him another dozen games, you are probably just kicking the can down the road. What do you do if he wins 4, draws 4 and loses 4? History suggests another 4 wins in the next 12 is very unlikely (in the last 26 league games we have won 5). You're then sitting there with 17 points from 18 games and likely about 2nd or 3rd from bottom. If you look back to the tail end of last season, it is now 9 defeats and 1 draw from the last 10 league games. Just not good enough.

Rose had to tell a caddy to get out of his eye line once but I don’t think any of the players would have been standing across putting lines, that would have caused a riot. I don’t remember seeing the American players doing too much wrong, just their play has been shite and their supporters are arseholes.

I hate knee jerk reactions and always think a manager should get a good 40 games before you make your up mind. Now that he has had a sustained run of matches I am not sure what benefit it is to keep him in post. It would be knee jerk in itself to keep him on if he won say 3 of the next 4 because history suggests that he cannot do it over the longer term. Usually the argument with a new manager is that we need to give him time to adapt to the league, stamp his style of play on the team and get in his own players. In this case we did well initially and now he has had time to do all of these things, we are horrific. Just bite the bullet, admit it has not worked and move on.

Consistency of selection is a big factor for me. Pick a team for a few games and stick with it rather than chopping and changing it all the time. It is almost like Thelin has run out of ideas and is hoping he might stumble upon something that works, which is a classic manager under pressure tactic. The whole subs for the sake of subs is doing my head in. Why do you need to be subbing players in their mid 20s after an hour, just one month into the season? In the Falkirk game he had made 4 subs before the hour and 5 subs by minute 72 against Livi. Just pick the right team for a start and have a bit of faith in the game plan.

Presumably we are not looking at reinventing the wheel though? We already have a director of football so this new person surely would be continuing with the existing plan…..or are we just tearing it all up on the Monday morning and starting again? If that is the case we might as well just fire the manager and stick the whole squad up for sale.

Hard position to recruit for I'd imagine. In an ideal world I think it would be great to have an older type who knows the club, maybe an ex-manager who had been around the block a bit but hard to think of anyone like that. Most of our ex-managers have not been very good. Hope it is someone who has seen it and done it rather than some young whipper snapper who is just out of college and talks about underlapping full backs, low blocks and transitions. Knowing Dave, he will appoint someone like Carlos Bocanegra. You heard it here first.

Massive schoolboy error. Never buy a pre packed buttery

Across the board, I don't think there are many examples of players who make it back to their best after they slide down a level or two. Most players seem to lose interest once they have been discarded by the big clubs. England could almost field a team of them - guys like Dele Alli, Jayden Sancho, Ross Barkley, Calvin Phillips, Raheem Sterling and the rest.

Hard to know what to expect from this guy. I have read comparisons with Charlie Nic and Hans Gillhaus and would be great if he is anywhere near that level. If you look at the detail, he is 27 and been capped just 14 times by Sweden who are not blessed with a vast array of exciting wide players. He has played the equivalent of about 14 full games in the last two seasons. Certainly has an eye for a goal by the looks of things. Very strange that Bologna would splash out €11M for him then only play him 15 times . Been racking my brain to think of a player who we have signed that was once brilliant and we have rehabilitated back to life but struggling.

Thing is, if the Dons make a habit of having a few young lads in the team then parents will surely encourage their kids to pick us instead of other sides if they can see that the lads will get a genuine chance of breaking through. If a 16 year old goes down to Man City, his chances of breaking through there are like the odds of winning the lottery. City can basically have their pick of the world's best youngsters. We need to actually play these guys though, just sticking them in the first team squad because they are Scottish and signing a load of 24 year old foreigners in the hope of selling one for big money is not the answer.

This was leaked earlier by a member of the backroom staff. Apparently Clarke insisted on Ralston at right back until Naismith assured him that he was sent home injured. Plan is to keep it tight until the last seven minutes then bring on Adams for Dykes.

It’s just a bit frustrating watching us at times isn’t it? You feel like there are just too many times where we do not do ourselves justice and the team performance is not equal to the sum of the parts. We’re not world beaters but my god, we have such an inferiority complex when playing anybody remotely decent. We really should be aspiring to be at the same level as a Denmark, Sweden or Switzerland, surely that is not unrealistic? You watch a team like Wales and they always seem to give any opposition a real tough match despite having a team that on paper that ain’t that great at all. If we are starting a game with the likes of McGinn, McTominay, Robertson, Ferguson, Hickey, Tierney, Gilmour and Christie, why the hell should we feel inferior to what you might call a middle ranking kind of team? Yes, we have a handful of bang average players in there as well but not everyone playing for a Sweden or Denmark is a superstar. I just don’t think we believe in ourselves enough. Setting out with a mentality of “let’s not lose this” is just not very brave and even more so when our central defence and goalie are the weakest parts of the team.

I know it happens loads in the strange world of football but the whole home/away concept is totally bizarre and 100% psychological. I would love to have been in the dressing room to hear exactly how Clarke addressed the players last night. We play Denmark away from home and set out to not lose the game yet we think by playing at home, we are at some sort of advantage, and will play totally differently. The players, by and large will be the same, the surface, the climate and rules are the same, so why are we treating the games any differently? This is not like tennis where you might be better at Wimbledon than in Paris because one surface suits your game better than another. Or in golf where Augusta may suit your game better than a links. The only difference between Hampden and playing away is really that you have the majority of the support. We come off the park last night almost celebrating our point as if it is some kind of moral victory where in actual fact, we have not taken any points off Denmark, we are on both on one point and we have in fact lost ground on Greece. All is really does is put more pressure on the team to win the remainder of the matches. The ex-hun on the BBC last night kind of eluded to it when he asked Brown and McCann, are you happy seeing Scotland sitting in and parking the bus and you have to wonder. The Danes won't be playing the way we did last night when they go to Glasgow. It's almost like we handicap ourselves from the outset. We have the opportunity to win 3 points, 1 point or no points and before a ball is kicked we take the 3 point option out of the equation straight away. I always think in these qualifiers that to get through, you need to win a tough game that perhaps you were not expected to win. If we had been a wee bit braver and come off with a win last night, we would have struck a massive blow to the Danes qualification hopes. If we had been a little more positive but ended up losing the game, it would probably have meant going all out for the win at Hampden which is exactly how we still have to set up anyway so a point has made little difference.

Not bad Rico and lovely graphics too. I'd have Ferguson in for Christie, maybe Bowie in instead of Adams and my Granny in for Gunn but apart from that I'd go with the same. As long as we can stop getting Gunn involved we have a chance.

Pity that Boyd never got more game time. We're so slow to bring players through in this country....and I know you cannot put half a dozen in the team at the same time. The 20 minute bit parts I don't think help anybody. I would contrast what the Dons did with Boyd to what Motherwell did with Lennon Miller. Miller got 60 odd games (proper appearances) and Motherwell got both the benefit of him as a player in their team plus a far greater fee than AFC achieved with Boyd. We neither got a decent fee nor anything added to our team and now we will never know if the lad really had it or not. You would like to think that if he had played a proper run of games that he might have been more inclined to sign a longer deal and if not, would have been sold for more cash. Surely 10 experienced first team players can carry a youngster in the team for a wee while.

Holy fuck, we actually have some players born in this country. In all seriousness, this is a game changer and I think this has actually saved Thelin’s job because the way things were, it was a matter of time before he was heading for the exit door. Nisbet is the closest thing you’ll get to buying guaranteed goals. He’s sure to chalk up 40+ goals in the next three years which makes a huge difference. And yes, he is 33 but Armstrong is a fantastic footballer. Hope he is still up to it physically because a couple of seasons ago he would have been head and shoulders above anything else we had in our team.