DoofersDad

You read the Daily Mail?

Butcher seems to have found a formula here that works. That will be partly down to him and partly down to the nature of the club. There is no reason to think that he will suddenly turn a failing bigger club around. With Rangers currently out of the picture, we have a great chance to win silverware this season and get into Europe. Why would he walk away from that opportunity? Not only would he just love to lead his team out at a cup final and lead a team into Europe, but his stock would rise hugely if he achieved that. If he does want to finish his career at a bigger club (and I wouldn't blame him if he did) then he needs to see this season through and have the record of real acheivement under his belt. Don't forget, after the Barnsley fiasco he did publicly state that he would be here till the end of his contract, so I for one will be pretty hacked off if he breaks his word on that. But what the Barnsley episode demonstrated was that for all the talk of unfinished business here, Butcher does aspire to move on to a bigger club. My guess he will be here at the end of this season but almost certainly not at the end of the next. I also doubt that he will enjoy the kind of success elswhere that he has enjoyed here. Not that I'm biased of course, but I think the best career choice for Terry would be to sign a contract with ICT to take him up to retirement. He will then be able to maintain a healthy income as a pundit and after dinner speaker etc whilst continuing to enjoy the high quality of life the area offers. Sounds like a good life to me.

As a youngster I remember a player scoring 7 of 8 goals for my hometown team with the 8th being scored by his brother. There was also the famous occasion of Chris Nichol playing for Villa against Leicester City and getting all four goals in a 2 all draw. But I can't find anything to beat Gary Weir's achievement. The Highland League should look into it and perhaps make a special presentaton to him at the end of the season - unless, of course, someone betters the record in the meantime!

The playing surface looked pretty good the other night. I guess county will want to delay the rematch as long as possible so some proper rain can turn their ground into its usual sorry state thereby evening it up as a contest.

I suppose the rationale is that if a player committed the sort of horrendous offence which would see him getting a season long ban or worse e.g kicking an opponent in the head whilst they were on the floor, the SFA could not ignore that sort of behaviour and let it go unpunished. The SFA presumably take the view that in such cases a red card would have to stand. They then follow that through to say that as a player getting two yellow cards gets a red card, that yellow cards also have to stand. That is failed logic in my view. Let us suppose that a player handles the ball in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the ball going in the net and gets sent off and then the game is abandoned. That would mean the player would have a record of having a red card for an incident related to a goal which officially didn't exist. Serious behaviour which warrants punishment can surely be dealt with as a result of the contents of the referee's report irrespective of whether a player technically has a red card or not. Presumably it is too much to expect a bit of commonsense to be applied here.

Well that beats my journey of an 800 mile round trip from Wakefield. I don't get to make it to many matches so was very excited to make it to this one so I booked 2 days of annual leave, spent £85 train fare and for what, half a match. I'm not expecting county to reimburse me but I am going to write to the club and ask none the less as I think they should do considering it was not extenuating circumstances or the weathers fault. You got to beat me at golf. That is an occurance so unusual I would have thought that alone would be well worth the train fare and taking two days annual leave!

I see that Gary Weir scored all EIGHT goals for Wick against Fort William! The Wick academy website has posted the following:- "Gary Weir broke the Club record today as he scored all 8 Academy goals in our 8-1 win over visitors Fort William. The previous highest scoring record in a single game was by Richard Macadie who scored 5 in our 7-0 win away to Buckie Thistle in December 2012. It took 30 minutes before Weir opened the scoring and Academy only held the lead for 4 minutes with Keith Millar firing a dipping shot under James More's cross-bar. From then on though everything that Weir seemed to touch flew in and he was awarded the man of the match award for his brilliant scoring performance." What a fantastic performance!

Would BT sports still have a contract for showing this on TV? would they want to take the risk? I wonder if this would have a bearing on the date.

A profit and we've paid our electricity bills.

MacGregor was very quick to blame the rain for the floodlight failures. Presumably this is to pre-empt legitimate claims by fans of both sides who will have travelled hundreds of miles to get to the game, taken annual leave, paid for accommodation etc. Fair enough if the fog rolls in or the snow is heavy but when it is a failure of the infrastructure of the club then there must be more liablilty on behalf of the club. It will be interesting to hear what the "investigation" turns up but one fact is certain, the amount of rain that fell on Dingwall in the last 24 hours was nothing exceptional and cannot be used as an excuse. Salt rather rubbed in to the wounds on the way home when you looked back to Dingwall to see the floodlights blazing. Full marks to the caley fans with an instant chant of "forever in our Shadow" the moment the stadium was plunged into darkness!

Why do we persist in using the term "professional" foul. These fouls are unprofessional fouls. Many of us who work in the health service, teaching, police etc know what being professional is. Part of being professional is behaving with integrity and not circumventing rules or laws for your own self interest. Having cheating behaviour branded as "professional" is really quite offensive. But aside from that, I fail to understand why football's ruling bodies tolerate this. It seems that any remotely 50:50 incident is always given in favour of the defender. Week in week out we see defenders with their arms round forwards, blatant pushes in the back and pulling shirts and the referees simply ignore it. When the forwards do this or it is a bit of a 50:50 incident the foul is always given to the benefit of the defending side. People come to football to see goals. If the officials only applied the laws of the game there would be less cheating, more goals and more people would watch.

The captain is hardly going to tell the press that a particular player was rubbish. His role is to talk the team up. I wasn't at the game, but if I wanted an objective view on who played well I would listen to Renegade before listening to Foran.

As a modest Englishman I wasn't going to say anything. After all, we've only qualified for the world cup finals - again. It's not as if we've won it yet - or should that also be "again"? I appreciate that England's group was easier for England than the groups were for the other home nations, but that is becasue England did not have to compete against a top seed side being a top seed side themselves. Look on the bright side though. Scotland seem to be improving under Strachan and I imagine they will be in demand for a lot of friendlies with teams heading to Brazil. This will help in getting ranking points and building a good momentum ahead of the Euro qualifiers. Meanwhile England will be rebuilding after failing to meet expectations in Brazil.

Not quite sure how Uruguay are ranked 6th in the world seeing as they have failed to qualify as one of the top 4 in the South American qualifying. What is more suprising is that Brazil have dropped out of the top 10 and therefore are only in pot one because of their status as hosts.

Fantastic servant to the club over the years. Always gave 100%. With the work ethic and loyalty he has displayed over the years I am sure he will succeed in his seconfd career, whatever it may be. Good luck to you, Grant.

I think Shearer had about a 90% success rate. That's one of the best but someway short of Le Tissier and Stewart.

That's not a rush for tickets, it's a County training session.

You don't have to be in the singing section to sing - just make sure you are at the right end of the ground.

Good old BBC. They don't have this story on the ICT page. It is on their Ross County page instead.

I suppose it is one thing practising penalties in training and quite another taking one in a pressurised match situaton, but it always surprises me just how many are missed. Let's face it, the goal gives you a fair bit to aim at and if you hit it pretty hard and close to the post then it doesn't matter how good the keeper is, they are not going to save it. Professional footballers ought to be able to hit the target area that the keeper can't realistically get to with a high degree of regularity. Too many players try to pass the ball into the bottom corner and if the keeper guesses correctly, there is a good chance it will be saved. Just welly it and 9 times out of 10 you should score. Some of you will remember the Scot Ray Stewart who played for West Ham in the 80s. He scored 81 of 86 penalties in his career and simply ran up and hit the ball as hard as he could. Both feet were off the ground when the ball ripped into the back of the net. All the keepers knew what he was going to do but there was nothing they could do but hope that they managed to get a bit a bit of their body in the way and not be maimed by doing so.

Fixed it for you!

We also need people shooting from distance more often. A bit like this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_ebedded&v=zh-2eGezFeI#t=71

Told you, you were wrong. In fact we only needed to slip down to 2nd place for the negative posts to emerge.

With the way the other results went, a win would have put some distance between the top two and the rest so it is disappointing that we have been soundly thumped. Sounds like a real reality check here. We got off to a flyer because we had a settled team which apart from the keeper and Vincent knew each other from last season. Other teams are beginning to gel and there will be no easy games from now on. Celtic 3 points clear with a game in hand and I would expect them to run away with it now. The rest of the the sides are all capable of beating each other and I am sure all will have good runs and bad runs. We can always dream but we need to be realistic and accept that for a club with our resorces a top 6 finish represents an excellent season. We have to expect days like today but overall we are still doing very well.

Getting a wee bit off subject here, guys. The thread is about the treatment of Tam Cowan and not the merits of women's football per se. I happen to think Cowan is funny. I don't think he ever intends to offend people but his tongue in cheek humour can be cutting at times. In truth, I doubt that Cowan has any ill will towards women's football. What the article was doing was actually celebrating his beloved Motherwell and it just so happened that women's football was the butt of his humour. It really annoys me that people these days are so sensitive about the slightest thing. There seem to be some subjects you can no longer make jokes about and womens football seems to be the latest thing. Personally I am all for the promotion of the women's game. Of course it is not as good as the mens game in general but that is mainly a reflection of the number of women who play and the length of time they have played. But what annoys me is these people who, rather than defend the game or better still, respond in kind with a tongue in cheek attack on the mens game, instead try to gag those who dare poke gentle fun. Clearly the womens game will never be as physical as the men's, but as a consequence, it can be argued that to excell at the game women need to be more skillful. In time, the women's game could potentially display more skill than the mens game. And let's face it the real heroes of the mens game are not the big powerful guys, they are the small skillful players - Best, Maradonna, Cooper, Messi, Mckay, for example. Why can't those humourless morons who want to gag Cowan simply enter into the banter and laugh about it? For instance, the humourless Roseanna Cunningham could have retorted that if Cowan's Motherwell played more like the Scottish Women's team they might still be in Europe. Or could they not simply have said "Ha ha Tam. Very funny. But actually it was a great night and the first time the home side has scored so many at Fir Park for many a long year!" It should be clear to all that this was meant to amuse and not to offend or to be a serious critique of the women's game. After all, if Cowan seriously thought it was inappropriate to play a women's match at Motherwell's ground, he would have mentioned the most important reason which is, of course, that the high heels ruin the playing surface. But coming back to the BBC's action, I am seriously concerned about what it says about the attitudes in this country these days. He is taken to task for his obviously tongue in cheek remarks about women's football but not about something else in his column which to me, people might have genuine reason to feel offended about. The BBC and those that back their actions seem to be saying that it is fair game to suggest that men from Aberdeen may have an unnatural affection for sheep but not to make gentle fun of women's football. What sort of moral leadership does that offer? We really do need a sense of perspective here and certain people need to get a sense of humour.