The Mantis

Wyness subbed after an hour. Shane did well but missed a pen. Mikey Fraser in goals. Jamie Duff & Bayne never got on. Elgin unlucky after dominating the 2nd half.

Saw that Stuart McCaffrey the other night. He's the secretary of the Football Partnership, i.e. he hands out grants to clubs.

Both on eBay, looks a bit pricey to me for paperbacks. I think I paid £15 for 'Caley All The Way' in hardback and £3 for 'The Lilywhites' in paperback. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Caley-All-The-Way-by-Alex-Main-1886-1986-RARE-/141462652255?ssPageName=ADME:SS:SS:GB:1120 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/The-Lilywhites-Inverness-Clach-by-Rod-Clyne-1886-1986-RARE-/141462656278?ssPageName=ADME:SS:SS:GB:1120

I edited them

I tried editing this, this morning, and I thought it had disappeared altogether, then the site became unreachable. I'll have another go.

He also played a couple of years at Celtic and made 37 appearances. He started at Bonnyrigg Rose which is my local Junior club. Stanton scores League Cup Final New Year's Day 1973 In this last one you can see there was no segregation on the terraces.

That's why you moved up here though eh?

Alread Already been at the concrete lavvy pan this season. No thanks. Somebody like Bo'ness Utd would do.

Away you go

In my view it's globalisation and it's irreversible. Satellite TV and ease of travel mean that nobody punches above their weight any longer. I first became aware of this when I made my first trip to North America in 1998 (also the last time Scotland reached a major finals). I went to see the Blue Jays take on the Yankees at baseball and enjoyed it so much I went to another game in the minor league at Kitchener. I realised that the major league played to full houses in magnificent stadiums and pitchers were paid about $3m even then. Meanwhile, just below this level, the minors played to crowds of about 100, just like our Juniors or HL. So just as everything that happens over there, follows here about 10 years later, we have the elite such as the Champions' League and the Premiership, where the rich just get richer and people such as Wayne Rooney no longer breathe the same air as the rest of us. In the 70s you had a fair chance of bumping into a top player from the Scottish or English League on the High Street or in a pub, and top English sides sent up a strong team, not a reserve side, to play the likes of Rangers or Hibs, and as often as not they lost. By the same token, when I was at school, people got annoyed at seeing Old Firm scarves instead of Hearts/Hibs ones. When I started teaching in 1981 I started to see the odd Liverpool or Man U scarf. By the time I finished teaching in 2012 the boys tended to have a 'big' team from outside scotland, such as Chelsea or Barca, and didn't really take Scottish teams seriously any more. I have a friend in his mid-thirties who has QOS as his wee team as he comes from there, but he has a season ticket at Anfield. As for the national team, I used to tell the boys in my class that I felt sorry for them as they had never lived through the days of Scotland expecting to qualify. They just assumed that we had always been rubbish, didn't believe that we once qualified for 5 tournaments in a row and couldn't relate to watching legends like Law and Dalglish rather than Scott Brown and Alan Hutton.

You won't get into the playoffs unless your ground has bronze level, and you won't get bronze level unless you have floodlights to 300 lux. So there's no chance of winning the HL/LL then taking part in the playoffs just for the gate money, knowing you can't be promoted. I don't think there's any contradiction in the set up at all. One thing the advent of the LL has done for the game is to raise standards so that all the clubs are playing in what is recognised as a 'football stadium'. Just as the separate leagues in the English pyramid have their standards at each level. It's all very well saying that progressive clubs should be able to rise, but not if they are concentrating all their resources on the first team at the expense of developing the rest of the club. The more you look at the licensing criteria, the more sense they make. Some of the clubs left behind in the EOSL are playing in public parks or schools so they will be barred from the Scottish Cup. In the HL you're used to clubs having a proper stadium of their own but down here it's different. For my club, Whitehill, floodlights will be a massive problem to finance, but I accept that they are necessary to play in a national league with midweek fixtures (even though I think a national league for part time clubs is nonsense).

It does and it doesn't....... The overall level is always taken as the lowest level the club is at out of all categories. In the case of sevco it's their finances that let them down - but the same goes for Hearts who aren't a new club.

Bucketing rain here since afternoon. Whitehill's match under threat. The Shire could stay in the Cup for another week.

That's your story anyway.

I think you have to remember that Uni teams often struggle at the start of the season till the term starts. However SUFC players are more or less professionals anyway as most people connected with 'traditional' clubs such as myself will be happy to tell you....... Ferguson Park, Rosewell for me on Saturday. Whitehill v East Stirling. I thought the Highland Derby was going to be on BT Sport? I've just started using it but every time I switch on expecting a live game it's never on

Difficult to pick a 'result of the day' as most games went as predicted. Possibly E.Kilbride winning at LGBT

What app is it? I had the BBC one but it was no better than the website and slower to load. Most weeks in the LL the updates are good but this is a special weekend for the wee clubs. Right at this moment (7.28 pm) the BBC website does not have a single scottish cup result, just a list of kickoff times.

Ended up choosing Hurlford, thought the odds were still pretty decent for them. Auchinleck Hurlford Formartine Utd Wick Bo'ness Sadly it was Wick that let me down even though they were 1-0 up. No real surprises today. All Junior sides done well with Culter and Banks O'dee proving they are more than capable of playing in the HL. I'm calling for them to open up the trap door in the HL and let in the North Juniors. Where did you get the scores? BBC website is useless and LL site only has relevant clubs.

Especially that time he came on as a second half sub at Gayfield and got sent off 3 mins later.....

Disappointing choice. Not enough seethe factor for my liking. Missing Deek already.

Nae trains? That's a bummer. I can actually make Sunday but not Saturday.

The alcohol ban happened after the ugly sisters rioted at the 1980 Cup Final. However OF games were segregated long before that.

Are you saying you know that this is the rule at all clubs (apart from Cownty of course)? With all the matchday duties that people have at clubs I can't see the motivation for providing anything but an estimate with 10 mins left because fans expect it. It also adds a level of difficulty in the case of our club as we don't have a separate gate for STs so somebody would need to do a few (admittedly fairly simple) sums. There's also the legendary situation in Scottish Cup matches where everybody, yes probably everybody, rips off the away club by underannouncing the attendance, although with computerised turnstiles I'm not 100% sure how they get away with it.