sancho_panza

I think it's a bit deluded to think we're just being unlucky. If you look at expected goals, which most teams focus on now rather than possession/shots, then we aren't outplaying anyone. The only game in the league we've really dominated was Ross County. We have a lot of aimless possession, a lack of cutting edge in attacking areas and a leaky defence. Teams set up like that don't usually have a lot of success.

I thought going into this season that we'd made the defence worse. Just about the only decent thing about us last season was that we looked fairly solid with Taylor, Considine and Hoban at the back. We've turned that into Bates/Gallagher/McCrorie with Gary Woods in goals. It isn't a great mystery why we're conceding more, we have substantially worse defenders. Our problems really start from that. There's no point trying to reinvent the wheel when you can't defend properly. It reminds me a bit of McGhee who came in with grand plans to have us playing progressive football but mismanaged the defensive side of the team. It certainly isn't as bad as that yet and some of it wasn't the fault of Glass (e.g. Considine's injury) but teams that have loads of ineffective possession and cough up cheap goals on a regular basis end up in relegation battles.

Obviously it's Cormack's fault for hiring Glass, but really what you want from a chairman is someone that invests money and he's done that to be fair. Most chairmen are clueless when it comes to the actual football bit so that isn't a fatal flaw necessarily if we can tombola our way into the right manager. If he refuses to sack Glass then that will be different but it's starting to make Cormack look bad so I think he'll do it out of self-preservation if nothing else.

I don't think anyone will be putting money on us to do it, but if we get a lucky draw who knows. The likes of Italy, Spain and Portugal could end up in the playoffs but it's probably more likely it's something like this: Semi-final: Austria, Czech Republic, Norway, Romania, Ukraine or Wales Final: Croatia, Poland, Serbia, Sweden or Switzerland

I thought the way Dykes pulled his hand away was pretty telling but fortunately they had blurry mobile phone quality video footage that made it impossible to overturn. I agree VAR ruins the game though. Every time someone scores a goal now a little part of your brain is telling you to hold on a minute because there might be some borderline foul somewhere. It's completely undermined the biggest appeal of football which is the raw immediate reaction to a goal being scored. Prioritising technical accuracy over entertainment is just daft.

I think we would have won that without the sending off so can't blame Glass for it too much. The harsh reality though is that result will put him closer to getting sacked. He needs something against Dundee probably or he's in trouble assuming Celtic beat us.

The only arguments you could make in favour of Glass (he's just been appointed, give him time, etc.) would apply equally to a traffic cone in a bowler hat. I can't see any actual reason to think he's going to be a success. He has no track record, he was hired because he's mates with the chairman, he doesn't sound convincing when he speaks to the media, his signings don't look up to much, the results have been poor overall and the performances seem to be getting worse rather than better. Anything is possible, maybe he'll turn it around somehow (see the traffic cone again) but I'd be putting money on him being sacked and Brown taking over before the end of the season.

We did dominate possession and we had more shots but we also did that in the game you've mentioned here. Overall we had worse chances than Motherwell did. Here are the xG numbers for the game you're talking about and this one: 23 Dec 2020 - Motherwell 0.22 / Aberdeen 1.16 11 Sep 2021 - Motherwell 1.30 / Aberdeen 1.01 That doesn't say improvement to me. It matches what I think, which is that our defence looks substantially worse but we're not sufficiently better going forward to compensate for that. I also don't see this as the embryonic stages of a new team that's going places. We're still bedding in new signings but most of them are over 30, squad filler, or loan players. Our best players bar Brown (Ramsay, Ferguson, Hedges, etc.) were all here before Glass and the likes of Ramirez, JET and Gallagher are probably as good as they're going to get. I don't think we're a complete disaster. Bates might improve things and Hedges makes a difference. We are definitely better at keeping possession than we were under McInnes, but the real question is whether Glass is the right man for the job long-term and I would say the early signs are pretty mixed so far.

He was involved in the goal, but he was non-existent outside of the two moments you mention which were both basically give and gos that someone else (Patterson/Gilmour) played off him. I mean fair play on him not making an arse of those two passes but if he can't get into a game against Moldova at home where we had umpteen attacking opportunities then he has no chance against a better side.

I looked it up and Nisbet completed five passes in the whole game, fewer than every other player on the pitch except two Moldovan substitutes who came on in the 88th and 94th minute. Pretty sure he was playing dodgeball.

I wonder if they might just put a ban on heading during training. I think the NFL does something similar where they couldn't do much to make the sport completely safe so they just have a lot of restrictions on training.

I think the problem with loaning young Premier League players is that they're rarely ready to make much of an impact or they wouldn't be loaned out to us in the first place. I always think back to Maddison, who was arguably one of the most talented players to play for us in the last 20 years if you look at what he's done since, but even he barely did anything for us beyond one glorious free kick. That's kind of the best case scenario and it still wasn't that great.

I'll go 0-0 as really terrible pitches tend to take all the flow out of a game plus Qarabag don't seem to score or concede a lot at the best of times (judging by Panda's list above).

Some variant of this argument has been used to defend just about every terrible player we've had in the last 20 years (the classic line used to be "remember when everyone thought Russell Anderson was shite after his first few games"). As an argument it's basically a recipe for saying nothing. You have to judge players on something. I don't like Gurr on paper and I don't like much of what I've seen from him on the pitch as he seems to lack basic technique (his error was directly linked to that as he clearly wasn't confident using his wrong foot and waited too long on the ball coming as a result). If you've seen something you like and disagree then I don't have a problem with that, but this isn't a peer-reviewed academic study where we have to wait for six months of data before reaching a conclusion.

He's 25 and had played one professional game in his career before joining us, he was let go by a side who are now consistently playing a right back who couldn't get in our team last season, he just made a terrible mistake that knocked us out the league cup, and having watched every game he's played for us so far he looks to me like someone with a good work ethic who is pretty poor technically and a bit naive tactically. I'm sure he's a nice guy, he looks to have a great attitude, I admire him for managing to get to this level given his complete lack of pedigree and I'm not going to "write him off completely", but on the balance of the evidence so far do I think he's going to be a good signing? No.

I think you can legislate for someone with his ability blowing a game with a basic mistake like that. We all expected him to be terrible and he's won a few people over by exceeding those expectations with some limited game time, but today we probably saw why Atlanta let him go in the first place. He wasn't the only right back in the world available, we could have signed someone else as cover (we in fact own a Venezuelan international right back... allegedly) so Glass has to at least take some of the responsibility for it.

We replaced Jack with Greg Tansey, had fewer points in the league, a worse goal difference and went out at an earlier stage in both cups to Motherwell when in the previous season we'd made the final of both and lost to Celtic. It absolutely made us worse, things just didn't fall apart completely.

It would be pretty optimistic to think him leaving won't make us a worse team. It's similar to when we lost Jack, most people thought he was an arsehole but it still made us a worse team because we had no chance of replacing him in the short-term. Best we can hope for is to unearth another young player who turns out to be as good as Ferguson in 2-3 years, at which point said player will probably run off to join Bournemouth or someone and the cycle will begin again. At least in this case we have a good situation with the contract so can get a decent fee in theory.

To me that looks like the kind of team you might run out in a League Cup group game against East Kilbride or somebody. If we pick up a win with that side then Glass is a confirmed genius.

So the draw for the playoff round starts in an hour. I think the options span from winnable (2/3) to not much chance (1) and may as well not bother playing (4). 1. Újpest FC (HUN) / FC Basel 1893 (SUI) 2. AEL Limassol FC (CYP) / Qarabağ FK (AZE) 3. The New Saints FC (WAL) / FC Viktoria Plzeň (CZE) 4. Tottenham Hotspur (ENG)

Skateboarding is incredibly dull in my opinion. One of those things that takes a huge amount of skill but still doesn't look that impressive despite the hipster guy from Shoreditch on the commentary going mental every five seconds. I like just about everything else though. The shooting and archery was strangely compelling, Argentina vs South Africa in the rugby 7s was amazing drama with Argentina managing to win with two guys sent off, also quite like the diving and seeing how people cope under ridiculous amounts of pressure.

Our best hope is probably to draw one of the lesser seeds and then that side to get knocked out before we play them. That's basically what's happened to us with Breidablik who were the second lowest ranked side in the draw in this round.

Even if Brown is fine to play two games a week, he could easily pick up a knock so I don't see the point of risking it when we're 5-1 up. Games like this are why we have the likes of McGeough in the squad.

I think at least half of the pub quizzes I've ever entered have ended like this. Two of my mates came to blows once because one of them thought Greg Rusedski won the US Open.

Feels similar to me as well, but probably with slightly less chaos behind the scenes and we won't have Stuart Duff at centre back. 2-0 Hacken