wokinginashearerwonderland

Do wish Rob McLean would quit calling players by their first names like their his mates.

Ah, the Hun demise is massively over played. They are probably 3 points worse off than you would realistically expect to them to be at this stage all because of the loss to Killie. The Celtic defeat and the Hearts draw were not hugely unexpected. If you look at our own fixtures we are maybe 6 points better than we would hope to be if you had looked through the fixture list at the start.

Not sure where folk are getting this from. Dons are 14/5 to win this. Hunnery are favourites at 21/20 with the bookies.

McInnes incoming at Tynecastle surely

Our fans are getting a wee bit excited by very little IMO. The shitey stages of the league cup apart, we have played four proper games this season and beaten St Mirren and Killie at home and St Johnstone and Ross County away. I mean it's not exactly the European elite is it? Rangers have dropped five points via a draw at Tynecastle and a loss at Parkhead so are basically two points worse off than you would probably expect them to be at this stage. I'd like to think we will be a good bit better than last season but realistically we have only changed three or four players from last season and lost 25 goals out of our team by selling a £7M striker. We still have the nucleus of a side that was nearly hauled into a relegation scrap a few months back. To say we have suddenly a great chance of second place is a bit strong at this stage but fingers crossed.

The old slapper

I'm a little surprised by all that has gone in the last few days. It actually makes it look like Clarke is very unprepared. We have lost 3 first team players if you like, in Hickey, Patterson and Dykes and now it seems like anyone with a Scottish passport could get the call. He's known for weeks that it was likely neither Hickey nor Patterson would make it yet our replacement only makes his debut a couple of weeks before the tournament which is a bit mad. The right back slot, assuming we go with three centre halves, is arguably the easiest position to play on the pitch. Craig Burley played most of his international career there for Craig Brown and did a pretty good job. We could easily stick someone athletic in there and get away with it. I would be tempted to try McTominay at right wing back and Christie/Armstrong could replace him in midfield. The forward thing is a bit weird too. Dykes and Adams have always been our first choice forwards and Shankland has come on to a game this season. Not sure why we are ripping up the game plan a week away from the finals by calling up players that have been nowhere near the team in Doak, Morgan and Conway. If you want someone direct and with an eye for goal rather than a number 9 as such, then Forrest is the obvious solution.

Bring on Dons, Caley, Cove, Peterhead and Buckie. North East tour

Not surprised, 16 points from 11 league games is some going

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.