sancho_panza

Given the inevitable demise of retail, they should just bulldoze a portion of the city centre and put the new stadium there. People keep talking about how to save city centres and all anyone seems to be able to come up with is wishy washy stuff about community facilities that nobody can put specifics on. A football stadium (maybe doubling as a venue for live music) is one of the few things that is still going to be able to bring people into the centre.

Hernandez seems to have been left out the last two Atlanta squads completely despite their starting right back being injured.

It was Ramsay's fault in my opinion. He let his man cut inside him and get a free cross under no pressure. Can't blame him as he's 17 but facts are facts.

I'm not going to defend UEFA, but the Champions League is only the way it is because the big clubs have been threatening a breakaway since the 1990s and UEFA (i.e. the representative of national football associations) have had to give in to them because they're in a weak position. UEFA might be useless/corrupt but even if you had a genius at the top of UEFA they wouldn't be able to do much. It's a bit like blaming the SFA for Scottish football being uncompetitive - the SFA are indeed useless but it's the Old Firm that hold 90% of the responsibility for it and reforming the SFA/UEFA is never going to achieve anything unless you take the power away from the big clubs.

I wouldn't say he was even that good in the first place - a pure poacher who needed the whole team set up to compensate for his inability to do the dirty work, scored goals with bad teams but failed to do so with better ones, etc. He's a bit like Shankland if Shankland was six years older and hadn't had a good season since 2015.

I think the Denmark result suits us to be honest. We're realistically playing for second after those first two results and we play Denmark at home in the last game so there's a chance they'll already have won the group by then. Also quite encouraged at how shite Austria seem to be, they were getting talked up when the draw was made as world beaters and they don't look much better than us in reality.

I hope Clarke bins the 3-5-2 after that. The way we're using it is more like a 5-3-2 and when teams get near our box we end up with too many players dropping deep and not enough players pressing the ball. All three of the goals we lost were that exact situation - too many players dropping deep, nobody there to press the ball, easy shot/cross under no pressure from a central area.

People say Robertson doesn't do anything, but the only reason McGinn was able to score his goal is because Robertson skinned his man in the middle of the park, won a corner by himself, and put two good deliveries into the box that Austria couldn't clear properly. If we're going to drop anyone after that it should be Dykes who looked well off the pace.

With him and Ferguson in the middle of the park (if Ferguson stays) I think we can rule out winning the fair play league.

This is basically an invitation to start throwing around random guesswork, which I'm reluctant to do because I'll freely admit I don't know how the relationship works. All I'm saying is that a lot of this - the Hernandez signing in particular - doesn't make much sense if you take it at face value. If you do take it at face value then we signed a Venezuelan international for an almost club record fee - a signing that was utterly out of step with every other signing our manager made in the eight years he was here. He was then frozen out the team, even behind Logan who had already fallen out of favour at that time, by the same manager who gave Stevie May 60+ appearances in the desperate hope of recouping something from a far smaller transfer fee. At best you could describe it as weird. With all that said, the questions you've made here aren't that difficult to answer if we start plucking scenarios out of thin air. They might have loaned us Gallagher under the assumption that we'd play him in X% of games - or at the very least it might have been explained to McInnes that he should play him to avoid damaging our budding relationship with Atlanta. The Hernandez signing might have been part-funded by Atlanta with the ultimate aim of him moving there (maybe as some way to avoid rules/financial commitments of some kind), but with us having no obligation to play him in the time he was here. I personally think Cormack probably just hired Glass because he already knew him, but if we want a conspiracy theory it's possible that Glass, having an Atlanta affiliation and being close with Cormack, would be more conducive to future weird loans/transfers than a complete outsider would be - from the perspective of Glass he gets to kickstart a managerial career so it's a fair deal if he occasionally gets a Jon Gallagher foisted on him. I don't believe a word of that, but the point is none of it is necessarily illogical. I personally thought Gallagher looked technically woeful in his time here and was mystified that he was consistently getting in the team ahead of people like Hedges and Wright, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything either.

If this were true then their national team would be a lot better than it is. They finished fifth in their qualifying group last time behind the likes of Panama (who England put six past at the tournament) and Honduras (lost a playoff to Australia), despite having the largest potential player pool in world football (according to the FIFA survey on participation rates). I'm not knocking the US, I'm actually a big fan of American sports, but I've seen several people on here now claim that the country is some hotbed of advanced coaching methods and I can't see any evidence for that beyond the single example of Jesse Marsh doing well at Salzburg. Anecdotally, I've played amateur football in a few different countries as I work abroad and my impression of American players is actually the exact opposite of what you're suggesting here - i.e. that they don't have good grassroots coaching and therefore many have no idea about the basics. I lived in Seattle for a little while in 2016 and the football facilities there were worse than what we have in say Glasgow in my opinion. And again, I'm not someone who hates the US, I don't see any reason why an American-based coach should be looked down on for their background, but the reality is we were always going to get Glass in because Cormack already knew him and the stuff he's come out with about American coaches is just some spin to justify his decision.

It's hard to judge whether he's just giving it to Glass because he knows him already (something that happens all the time in the business world - you make a big deal out of having an open hiring process then just appoint your mate regardless of who applies) or whether it's something more than that. At a minimum the relationship with Atlanta isn't what Cormack has said it is. It looked to me like Gallagher was getting put in the team for non-footballing reasons as we had several players better than he was in the squad at the time. It absolutely looked to me like we signed Hernandez because of some deal with Atlanta because there's no way we're blowing £800,000 on a player our manager clearly didn't rate who then coincidentally ended up getting loaned to Atlanta. Now we've appointed one of their coaches as our manager. The question is are we getting something out of all this or are Atlanta just using us. Still not sure which it is.

In some ways it's similar, for me the problem is that Miller in this case had a huge amount of status with the players that Glass isn't going to have. If you have an assistant who has a higher profile than the manager does then that just spells disaster for me, particularly if the two of them aren't very close to begin with. I also hope it doesn't go the same way because Aitken was a complete disaster - he's pretty much the epitome of what Cormack was talking about last week about us wasting huge transfer fees on bad singings in the 90s. He won a trophy but spent £3.6 million (about £7 million in today's money) trying to build a squad and left us as relegation fodder shortly afterwards. Probably carries more blame than just about anyone for the 15 years of dross we all experienced from the mid-90s onwards.

The whole dream team thing smacks a bit of trying to cover too many bases due to a lack of confidence in their own decision-making - get two inexperienced managers and maybe one will be good, bring Brown in as a player at the same time and maybe we can sell it to the fans as improving the squad, etc. There aren't many examples of this kind of arrangement working (i.e. the Assistant Manager arguably having a higher profile than the manager) and if it was going to work then you'd expect the two coaches to at least know each other beforehand - have Glass and Brown even had a conversation yet? It has mixed messages, disorganisation and disaster written all over it, particularly given Brown's personality.

I have more of a problem with people like Brown now being celebrated for his gesture of support to Kamara yesterday when he backed Tonev to the hilt over the Logan incident. Many of the Rangers fans now talking about racism were defending things like "Nakamura ate my dog" as "banter" a few years ago. Gerrard, who was captain of Liverpool at the time, thought it was a good idea for the whole team to wear pro-Suarez t-shirts after he racially abused Evra. The only way to end racism is to take a stand when it's your own fans or your own players that are doing it. It's easy to make anti-racism statements when it's the opposition that are being accused of it, but I can almost guarantee the next time someone in Scotland is accused of this we'll get the same closing of ranks "he's not that kind of player" stuff you're getting out of Slavia Prague at the moment.

There's a perception that it's all about the manager, but I honestly think this squad of players is mid-table quality at best. The centre backs are probably fine and I still think Ferguson and McRorie will be decent in the future given their age, but take Hedges out of it and we don't have much of anything in attacking areas that's better than teams below us.

We lost 1.2 goals a game last season and 0.94 goals a game this season so the defence has actually improved.

It depends on the manager obviously, but in general the failures at bigger clubs types have done quite well in Scotland. Steve Clarke was considered a failure at West Brom and Reading before he went to Killie. Rodgers was considered to be a bit of a busted flush when he went to Celtic. Management is about experience/judgement rather than form so it makes sense that people who have been higher up the food chain have some advantages. Good managers can come from smaller clubs as well clearly, the problem is that by the law of averages someone is bound to be on a decent run getting a mediocre side up to sixth in the league. You can give a list of umpteen managers who did that and were flavour of the month over the last few decades (e.g. Gary Holt) and Goodwin is simply the current one. Maybe he is in fact different but to be honest I doubt he would actually do better than someone like Lambert in reality, he's just more popular.

I think Glass getting it would raise some serious questions. The Gallagher situation was odd and looked like we'd been paid money by Atlanta to give him a run in the team. The Hernandez situation clearly wasn't our money given the size of the transfer fee and the fact McInnes didn't rate him or even know who he was. It reeked a bit of Atlanta trying to dodge some rule/tax restriction by buying us a player but still effectively controlling him as an asset (something reinforced by the fact we eventually loaned him to Atlanta). If you read between the lines of both of those deals though they arguably make sense from our perspective. Getting a free Venezuelan international in the squad for a season seems like a good deal and we obviously weren't under any obligation to play him. Gallagher wasn't up to much but you can see how it might have made sense in principle if we'd been given some money and a player for nothing. Appointing a shite manager, on the other hand, and likely undermining Cormack's position with the fans (almost none of whom will want Glass) would be taking it to a different level. If that actually does happen then either Atlanta are partly running the club and Cormack can't say no, or they're giving us some kind of major financial commitment that is so lucrative it makes sense.

Personally, I'd have some pretty big doubts about him. If you look at people like John Carver at Newcastle, it's obvious that being an assistant manager at a big club doesn't necessarily translate into having any ability to manage a team yourself. Big Dunc actually looks exactly like the traditional stereotype of an assistant manager - hard man persona, capable of shouting loudly, questionable intelligence. Darren Fletcher is far more interesting - achieved more than big Dunc as a player, had a better attitude, worked with better managers, seems pretty knowledgeable. Probably wouldn't take it as he's just joined Man United as a coach but I would ask him.

It's obviously the right move. Overall I don't think he was brilliant in his time here (a lot of his success was a product of us spending more money than everyone below us on players anyone would have wanted - McLean, Shinnie, etc.) but I find it hard to look at it objectively and say he was a genuinely bad manager at the same time. Had more success than anyone else we've had in living memory and we did actually play some good football for a period as well. It all went shite in the end but that happens to every manager eventually.

There's a tendency when things are going badly to throw blanket criticism at everything, but the real problem with McInnes is his ability to judge a player and it's basically the main explanation for why we've regressed. When we had Shinnie, McLean, peak McGinn/Hayes, etc. we were a legitimately good team. Any weaknesses McInnes has on the tactical side, with keeping players fit, motivating them and so on didn't stop us from having some level of success. What's happened is that despite having more resources to work with than most of the league, he's made countless bad signings and the quality of the squad has dropped. It's been an ill-conceived scattergun approach of throwing money at anyone with a reputation in Scotland rather than a considered building of the team. The impression I get of him is that he completely lacks the capacity to judge players as they are and is always relying on third-hand rationales to make decisions (player X used to be good, player Y is about to be signed by Hibs, player Z scored against us once). It's not just about scouting - there's an abundance of information about players around now, what you need isn't extensive scouting networks of old guys in trilby hats covering the globe, it's good judgement about a player's potential. I watched just about every game Stevie May played for us, for instance, and to me he never genuinely looked up to it yet he got 60+ appearances because of who he was on paper. That tells me the problem is on McInnes judging players, not a lack of information about targets. That's the problem and if we fixed it I don't think we'd be talking about passion or anything else.

Paul Lambert looks like he's about to be sacked at Ipswich. Not saying that because I want him as a replacement, but I could see it happening - Scottish, could pass as a big name, at a low ebb in his career, no compensation required, etc.

If you read between the lines then that statement doesn't look great for McInnes. It's basically intended to show the fans he's listening to them and knows the results aren't good enough. It then says Cormack has no doubts McInnes still wants to be here (rather than no doubts he's the best man for the job), which is damning him with faint praise. The rest of it is justification for why he isn't going to sack him today but leaves it open to sack him later if results don't improve. Statements like this always have positive fluff in them because you can't undermine the manager before you sack him, but if he was really 100% committed to keeping McInnes then I don't think he would have phrased it like this.

There are meaningless games in every setup (7th place gets five meaningless games after the split right now) but it's nowhere near the same scale. Look at the Premier League table right now in England - every team down to about 12th is probably within touching distance of a European spot with 9 games to go. Obviously a bunch of teams will end up in the middle regardless but it's the possibility of moving up the legue that keeps the interest. Drawing a line across the table in January and telling maybe a third of the league to go play for nothing for over three months just seems completely mental from an entertainment perspective. The only reason it's being proposed as far as I can see is we want league expansion but don't want to be too radical about it, but that's the worst of all worlds. It's also a sideshow because as you said, the biggest problem in Scottish football is the lack of competitiveness and you can only solve that with something radical like your NFL draft system/salary cap idea. That would be a progressive idea - a 14 team league is just a worse version of what we already have.