absent friend

I assume this could impact on our current local provider with a loss of trade. I hope this does not also impact on the quality. Increased profits are one thing, lowering standards are another.

He is only good enough now to start on the bench ....so is better than we have ...as a player?? As a coach....is he better than we have?? Inspire the younger players? Our last manager had to inspire him to extend his playing career as I recall. Heart ruling head comes to mind. He may however have a very good future in management with us, at some level, in the future but right now he is at that bad place most pro footballers come to in their career. Best playing days are over, no history of ability to coach/manage and therefore needs a club to take a punt. If we sign him that is what we are doing, in my opinion.

Maybe if he acted as professionally in his job at ICT, as he does on TV, then by some he may be more highly regarded. Don't be so serious - that was a wee joke!

I feel the same! It seems impossible that a proven goal scorer can stop scoring goals. I realise we are talking about him moving up a league (or two at the start), but you feel there must have been times when he could have stuck the ball in the net, for us, as he had done in the past. He has been given a chance but does not perform for us but like you, I am a bit apprehensive that he will return to form once he leaves us. However the time for action on the park is past so maybe it is time to offload. It may kickstart his career and the money side of things maybe less important to him than getting a regular game with goals to his name.

With all this money being spent on their education the Gaelic speakers will get all the best qualifications, best positions, then they will bring in all other Gaelic speakers into top positions of authority until there is a Gaelic top strata in this country and Smee and Co will be in BIG trouble!! They are infiltrating even as you read this. Gaelic will be the new religion. What school did you go to? Gaelic school! In you come. Or on the other hand....What school did you go to? Heriots in Edinburgh. No, No, they do not speak the Gaelic there. I'm afraid the post is taken. We do have a position in security? On Nights only?? What about your qualifications you ask? Qualifications are not the only thing that matters - you don't speak the Gaelic. Well, well if you go to that English speaking schools what can you expect ? You don't just enjoy the same resources you see!

Hibs are the exception - balls and ability! Hughes has the balls to put his neck on the line and his forwards have the ability to stick the ball in the net. Easy..... and it must be so exciting for their fans!!

His heart is obviously not in the job - no interest whatsoever! That's what happens when your manager does presentation work on TV.

Your question - Who cocked up the Marius contract? Scotty, maybe I am reading the above incorrectly but I see this as a wish to have the person who carried out the deal named - and indeed shamed, in their opinion, as they feel the contract was not drafted correctly, whereas I feel that it could be a legal beagle dispute and the matter be grey as opposed to black and white! I do agree that statements made does not help our cause, if indeed we do have any grounds for reducing the amount due, but I feel that it is so wrong to criticise without being in command of facts and indeed payment should be withheld until the need to pay be satisfied. If you look through previous postings you will find some people being surprised that a SPL contract was in place, as Alex has stated, as the inference has been that ICT did not carry out that part of their duty. I feel, like you, that it was not the contract but the termination actions that presents the greyness of the case but the overturning of a verdict is not unknown.

Can I therefore accept from the highlighted area in your above posting that, as a repeat customer and to deal fairly and squarely with you, you feel you are entitled to the name of the ICT official, or legal practitioner, who was party to the signing of said document?

I think the bold bit answers it all. Nothing, zilch, nada. There was an error on the contract, evidenced plainly by the fact that ICT sought to dispute the outcome. Therefore the interpretations of what was and was not permissible under the contract diverge. What we must demand to know is who, why what and so on? Someone somewhere got it badly wrong. Who? One says 'Seems to be some assumption that their was an error in the contract..... I've not seen anything from either side to suggest this is the case' The other says 'There was an error on the contract' This highlights the situation...nobody knows the full situation and all are guessing. To also offer one side of a story to confirm the situation is maybe a little bit suspect. At the end of the day it has all happened, let's hope they have learned from it. This raises a thought, with respect, what right has any fan got to demand the details of a legal document belonging to the club he supports and furthermore to demand the name of the ICT official, or legal practitioner, who was party to the signing of said document? Next we will have a call for Ian Black's transfer document on this forum - just so we can confirm it is OK by the fans and, when you are in that drawer maybe we can have a wee gander at the Rankin one as well to see you made a good job of it! We only want to know because we think we have a right!! .

Your question - Who cocked up the Marius contract? I assume from the highlighted area that you accept that maybe, just maybe, the Board did employ a legal advisor and he may have made a mistake as opposed to the ICT office girl sending Marius a one line email to confirm the signing. If this be the case, are you asking for the name of the legal firm involved or the actual solicitor acting, within the legal firm? Did we lose out financially on the Marius deal i.e. did we as a club pay out more for his service than we received over the period??

UEFA did not interpret it the same way as the boards solicitors did. I would assume that any transaction entered into by the Board members, in their everyday work, would have a legal input prior to any docs being signed and work commenced. Should the transaction have any overseas involvement I would suggest that a legal beagle with international knowledge would be brought in to confirm understanding. However reading between the lines of some posters on here, we as a club, with the same professional people at the helm, signed an overseas player up using the back of a fag packet. Aye, Right!! There may be room for a difference of opinion in law but that is hardly a 'fag packet' signing.

Maybe the cards are a reflection of the increased 'effort' being given by the team as a result of their team talk - Terry's size 12 must be quite intimidating. At half time maybe Foran had been given a heart to heart and promised to tone it down and considering, as stated on here, Foran was the best player on the park at that time, TB would have received belters for subbing him at halftime. Hindsight is wonderful. The snippet from the Tube of the game shows up some interesting areas, Foran tackling a player running away from our goal with all the defenders in place to take care of it, being a pro - WHY?. Jabi looking confident and getting stuck in, although we only see a wee bit of his game. Our shots at goal making their match report embarrassing.

I have stolen two of your quotes from this thread and to deal with the second one first - Are we entitled to be an SPL team? Do we have the fan base/financial support to carry an SPL team? Without a 'sugar daddy' can we do a Dundee and get better players in considering our financial and geographic, positions. Half full/half empty!! I think we were very fortunate to have the run we had in the top flight and it will come again BUT we have to 'enjoy' the games in the interim, against teams that were not in our league for the past few years until we regroup and become a force once more. Kingsmills showed his annoyance with the team, after Saturdays result and that is understandable but we have different players, almost a new team, to knit together and that will take time, especially when we accept that there will also be movement within the squad in the New Year. Are the Board doing the best job?? No way. Why? Because we should still be in the SPL, we should be better off financially and, in my opinion, that is a fact! However the past is past, what is done is done and they should move forward learning from their managerial/player signing mistakes. Are the posters better qualified than the Board members? I don't know as I have no idea who each poster is (the thread showing the posters occupations is an eye opener!) but I would hazard a guess that in no way are the posters, in the main, better qualified unless one takes hindsight into it as a factor! .

HT:0-1 FT:1-4 1st Scorer ICT:Foran 1st Scorer Opp:Holmes Crowd:1941

Cilla

This is totally unfair!! Why Bovril is ignored I just don't know. Pies, pies, pies, that's all we hear if you want to be a REAL fan - never poor old Bovril. I submit that Bovril does aid singing better than your common pie - or two! .

Of course you are all correct. What does heritage matter, it is all to do with popularity and usage? Never mind the Queen's English we could all use American English it's more used - we can all speak it and who cares if boring old tyre becomes new tire or whatever. Out with Shakespeare in with the X Factor - more people watching X Factor, who cares about boring old Will. Who now gives a f**t about art - more people interested in computers - close the galleries down. I could go on but you get my drift - kill off if historic and used by the minority, appears to be the call. They, the Gaelic speakers, are in the minority, so kill off their language, make them speak English because that is the language we speak. So very sad how we view this from a larger centre of English speakers - we know best! What is sort of funny is that we, up here, are seen from the centre of power, London, as a remote English Home County without the Chelsea Tractors and wealth and that this remoteness stops us from thinking for ourselves and we require people in the centre of this big population to know what is best for us. Maybe just reward!! .

landing on

In my original post I mentioned the 'senior' tag we now seem to have. I can imagine TB wanting 4 circuits of the park at team training 'but you Foran, Rossco, Munro and Golly just you do 2!!'' Aye right!! The young guns would be up in arms. So...is there a compromise in place where they all do 3 perhaps, to keep the peace? Talking about keeping the peace, I realise that the above will not be the case but is good relationships in the dressing room more important, at the moment, than hard training?? We were told Brewster lost the dressing room - surprise, surprise if they had just been made to overstretch themselves in training, in the player's opinion - I don't hear any of that at this time. .

Was Clackers the two high velocity balls on each end of a string and they rebounded off each other once you got up to speed, with a tremendous high pitched repeat noise? If they were, my story was about my work colleagues who traveled to Ireland, at the time of the troubles, to do some financal business. All three, just off the plane and coming out of the taxi, in pin stripped suits and brief cases about to walk into their office when gunfire sent all three diving behind the nearest cover. Round the corner towards them comes a wee boy with his Clackers going like mad, up from the dirt rose the three no longer business men but 'rag a muffins' - knees out of their suits and covered in mud! They did not call the wee boy an Angel, I can tell you! .

I would think the Motherwell manager would have preferred an easier tie than this. We must be seen, by him, as a potential problem for them. We have nothing to lose, the underdogs in a big way as they are currently flying high, but we could come out on top.

I remember Ian St John, as a successful manager, stating that the first thing to go on a football field when tiredness sets in, is a players natural ability. We have seen our team playing like champions for 45 minutes and then fading and looking very second, even third rate before the game is finished and I wonder if this is what Ian St John was referring to. When I see the ball breaking off ICT players to the opposition in the second half and this not being the case in the first half I wonder if the natural ability to get the ball under control has deserted them. There is no doubt in my mind that in the past when ICT were up against any standard of team, the final part of the game belonged to them. Their fitness was never in doubt. Now I wonder if this is the case. Could a better second half be enjoyed by improving their fitness/amending their training so that we could again witness a team that can perform for 90+ minutes, without breaking sweat? Is the senior age tag we now seem to have attached to our team mean that training is geared to the more senior players, less strenuous perhaps but creating problems on match days? .

Keep him Under our current manager's tuition he should be improving every week!! But there again I see the whole defence as being our weakness now which is surprising so maybe the manager is not such a good teacher as he was a player.

One of the problems with a thread like this is that many of us see it for what it is - a boring re-utterance of what has gone before HOWEVER if we say nothing all that is on here is negative comments which is an unfair picture of the real situation. The silent majority, if they reply are classed as the 'other camp' something I object to. I can and will make up my own mind regarding our managers ability but only after taking other area for consideration into the equation, over time. I do find it sad on here when other agendas rear their head 'English' 'blue nose' 'ex Rangers' (quote -'note sarcuism') when there is no need for it. There are other sites that pander to this rubbish. I did not realise that he only ever played for Rangers or so you would think, reading the offerings on here. What camp am I in? In none at the moment, along with many others I would think, unless giving support to the team puts you in a camp.