DoofersDad

Good to hear he is well on the way to recovery. Hope he gets signed up soon as he has been a big miss this season.

Is Fon Williams in the Welsh squad for the game against Northern Ireland tonight? On the BBC website I see that the Liverpool keeper Danny Ward is expected to make his debut for Wales. Fon Williams has had a pretty decent season, so I wonder whether he will feel that being away from the English leagues is impacting on his chances of progress within the Welsh team, particularly in the lead up to Wales have reached a major finals for the first time in ages and with World Cup qualifiers looming. This might be a significant factor in deciding whether to accept a contact.

I agree. We simply don't know all the detail behind the scenes and so it is just conjecture about who should be offered what and when, although it surely must be correct to aim to get key players signed up sooner rather than later. We also know that finances are a major factor in our ability to recruit new players to the club. We have to accept that many good players will choose to leave the club in order to further their careers whilst some who chose to stay reach a stage where they can no longer get into the side. That's life. Since the club was formed and through a succession of managers and chairmen, the club, has been successful in retaining a lot of the better players and replacing those players who do leave with players who are or who develop into better players. This is why the club has moved up through the leagues over the years and managed to reach 3rd place last year as well as lifting the Scottish Cup. But now, for the first time, I feel we are really struggling to retain players and the new players coming in show little prospect of being as good as those they are replacing. We urgently need to get some contacts signed and find some quality from somewhere else.

The team needs good vocal support and I don't think there is anybody who doesn't think the increased vocal support from the youngsters recently is great. But there is a world of difference between supporting your club by making a lot of noise, and harming your club by behaving in a way which might involve the police and which might result in the SFA taking sanctions against the club. You're smart enough to know what the difference is, so please continue to support the team by making a lot of noise - but just leave it at that.

It always promised to be an explosive occasion, but the crowd is hushed when Liam Polworth realises he has just stepped on a land mine.

Sadly I couldn't get to the game today, but what a great result! Particularly pleased to see a big swing in goal difference and for Storey to finally get on the scoresheet again. Wins like this should give the team a real lift but the fact is that our 2 previous wins against County this season have been followed by defeats against Kilmarnock in the next league match. It seems to me that the tactics for a match against County are usually different. If we adopt the attitude that it's a derby game so lefts just get in amongst them, then we seem to do so much better than when we play the patient tippy tappy build up stuff. Make no mistake about it, County are where they are in the league and they won the league cup because they are a pretty decent side this season. Had they won all 3 games against us they would be comfortably in 4th place and we would be 11th. Despite that, we have dominated them in this league season. The lesson here has to be that we are better when we play a more direct style of football. If we learn that lesson then not only should we make the top six, we should also finish the season above County.

One positive thing was the use of the long throw. I always knew Meekings could throw it long but I hadn't seen Tremarco throw it long before. Surely this is something we should use far more often - not only to get the ball in the box but, as Lawrence suggested earlier, to get the ball down the park quickly from throw ins in our own half.

I hope he signs. He may not have the personality of Brill but he seems a more solid keeper overall. Of all Hughes' signings, he is the one clear success.

Yes. We might have done better last night if Liam Hughes had picked the side and John Hughes had played as striker.

Seemingly he lost a contact lens and couldn't see straight. He appeared to be indicating to the bench that he needed to come off but they weren't having it. It was a farcical episode but I think the fault for that must lie with the bench rather than Oxley. Unless they had a spare lens readily to hand then they should have substituted him. To have a keeper with blurred vision on the park puts other players at risk as well as the obvious risk of losing a goal because the keeper can't see! I've no idea whether a referee can insist on a substitution in such circumstances but I'm sure someone will know. Of course, if it was all an act by Oxley then he should have been sent off.

I don't know what to make of that. I really couldn't believe the starting line up. It seems strange that all of a sudden both Meekings and Foran are fit enough for a full 90 minutes and that Wedderburn, Horner and Hughes are preferred to Polworth, Williams, Roberts and Storey. Were the 4 of them all injured or unwell to some extent such that they were deemed only fit enough for the bench? I would love to hear what the manager says about that. Despite that, I thought we started pretty positively and took the game to Hibs. But as is so often the case, there was little quality of delivery and neither Foran nor Hughes were sharp enough to look threatening. Slowly Hibs came into the game more and were gifted a couple of soft goals for a half time scoreline they scarcely deserved. Second half we improved with the introduction of Storey and Williams with Storey often threatening down the left wing. I can't fault the effort but it was mostly huff and puff and very little quality. It was the first time I have seen Hughes play and I thought he was very poor. He never seemed to make himself available and did little with the ball on the few occasions he didn't let the defender get to the ball first. It says a lot for the imbalance in the squad that he stayed on the park for the full 97 minutes. Hibs have certainly got quality but they started nervously and ended very nervously after Vigurs' composed finish. They were there for the taking but the sad truth is that we no longer have the quality in the team to exploit these opportunities. We now have a battle to stay in the top flight and on this form I will be mightily relieved if we finish the season in 10th place.

At least we are consistent!

We weren't knocked out of the League Cup by lower league opposition - it was worse than that. We got knocked out by County

Er .... No! That's our defence of the trophy over - but at least we remain champions until another team lifts the trophy on Cup Final day.

As you wish. The merger's history. Two fine clubs with a proud history merged and we now have a bigger and far more successful club. It's called progress and is something we should celebrate.

Enjoy Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Yawn

Actually, it was probably one or more too few. Two or more normal sized holes had become one big one!

Big result. It was nice to get a bit of luck with the referee's decisions for a change, but regardless of how much Aberdeen bleat (and they will bleat a lot) we were the better side. It was a good team effort and we showed more desire to win throughout the park. We do so much better when we adopt a more "up and at em" approach and look to get forward. Too often in the past when we get in the lead we tend to sit back and defend the lead. Tonight we kept pressing forward and got a 3rd, after which Aberdeen wilted. A great night's entertainment!

One of the major concerns for me in all of this is that the focus is on branding rather than on the quality or the entertainment value of the football. This has increasingly been the case in recent years as the "European Cup" has morphed into the "Champion's League" and we have the group stages which clearly generate a lot of money but which often tend to produce some rather lack lustre games. All it does is give more games to the privileged clubs that reach that stage and ensure maximum exposure of the big brands. And then what is even more outrageous is that some of the clubs which fail to progress in that competition get a second bite of the cherry in the Europa League (group stages and all). From a fans perspective, I would rather go back to the old format where the champions of each nation played home and away against one team in each round. Same with the Cup Winners' Cup. In that way all countries had the same right of entry as as any other and where, if a top team had an off day, smaller clubs could come through to win. The 3rd competition (once the" Fairs cup") allowed a few more teams from the bigger leageus a taste of European football which is fair enough. That system almost guaranteed the big clubs European football each year but also allowed the likes of Celtic and Aberdeen from Scotland and Villa and Forest in England to seize their opportunities and win major European trophies against the odds. That would just never happen now. Not only is it the way the competitions are structured, it is the way the money is distributed that makes it so hard for other teams to break into the big time. Television money and the exposure television brings means that as soon as decent players emerge from smaller clubs, they are snapped up which makes it increasingly difficult for the smaller clubs to compete. Of course, there will always be circumstances where smaller clubs emerge to upset the apple cart (such as Leicester City this season) but in the longer run, the big brands will become increasingly dominant. Unless a way can be found to revise the structure of competition and the distribution of television money in favour of fairness, then we will continue this trend towards branding and away from diversity.

I guess there's no Celtic supporter who can do the maths or they would have been whinging even more loudly about how unlucky they have been with the draws in recent years.

At the end of the day, the TV companies want to broadcast what the public want to see. And the companies who spend their billions on advertising will pay more if more are watching. This is an international business and the fact is that TV audiences worldwide want to watch the big clubs and the best players. Given that the audiences for the big money games are not actually in the countries where those games are played, the wishes of the fans who actually go and watch the matches simply don't get a look in. The gulf in wealth between the top clubs and the rest will get ever wider as will the gulf in wages between the top players and the rest. But that seems to be life. It happens in the film industry and the music industry and we, as consumers, fuel this imbalance by buying the products. It's not right but I don't see things changing any time soon.

I agree, but if that were part of the deal then I imagine the TV companies would not be paying as much. Swings and roundabouts or a gun to the SFA's heads, whichever way you want to look at it.

That's nice of you to say so. A bit off topic but as fate would have it, I once had a very brief conversation with Lenny Henry. He and his post Dawn French lady friend were in the security queue just in front of us at a small overseas airport. When we got through security they were standing around looking lost and he stopped us and asked us where the airport lounge was - not exactly a lot of laughs there either! But to be fair, I think Sir Lenny would be able to make a pretty good sketch out of the SFA QF draw farce. It would probably end up with all 5 ties being played in Dudley.

That's right. It's a bit like losing your virginity. It may not be your greatest performance but it is the seminal moment (so to speak), which gives you confidence in what you can achieve in the future.