vikingTON

Swing and a miss, champ.

I think your club should reflect on your own efforts at doing enough over a season to avoid being flushed down the pan. Not least given that the only reason you're still in contention on the final day is down to three points provided by, err, a ten man Arbroath team just three weeks ago. Or maybe you think it's unfair that every other club gets to play the only team worse than you too.

French's pace is more obvious in recovering defensively (often from his own mistake) and for that reason alone I can see why managers would want him in their back line. Critics of French overlook just how gubbins our centre back pairings would have been without that help IMO. I'd much rather have Jamie Brandon back once Livingston go down/into admin again, but other than moving O'Connor across to play right back for a while, I'd avoid going back out on the open market looking for a different option.

As for the pre-match discussion about referees and the disproportionate yellow card count for Morton, Colin Steven's display today summed up why statistics do not reflect the reality of a football game. For whatever reason - quite possibly the 'reputation' built up by a parade of opposition managers - his default option was simply to award a stoppage or foul whenever a Raith player went to ground. Which Raith defenders quite understandably used to their advantage to take off any pressure, but some of the decisions made were utterly laughable. Ironically the clearest foul on a Raith player in the entire game was overlooked halfway through the second half, leading to a breakaway that Crawford should have done much better with. I don't think Steven's display had a major impact on the outcome of the game but the final foul count will reflect the predisposition of that clown rather than either high pressing intensity or dirty b*****d play shown in today's game. Neither of which were on display - with the singular exception of Broadfoot clearing out Rudden in the first half.

Our season in a nutshell today. Played pretty well, created the better chances (without a draw actually being unfair though) but didn't have the cutting edge to get us over the line. Difficult to judge too much given the lowered stakes involved but I thought the defence did well throughout. In the big picture we've had a decent season - excellent in cup competitions, both financially and in performance terms. The club has turned a substantial profit in back to back years after losing money like a sieve for the past 25 years - these are not minor things. Given the loss of key first team players last summer I'm not surprised we had to just consolidate our position in the end - I'd have expected that before a ball was kicked. But with both Airdrie and Partick sitting on entirely achievable points totals, the sense of a lost opportunity can't be overlooked either.

If you're Forbes or her allies then absolutely. Not to mention being able to give a public show of loyalty to The Party after the Greens have been emptied, which is the obvious smart play before taking over in a couple of years and packaging Continuity Nicola as the problem. But with the numbers literally balanced it does only take one or two MSPs to take a leaf out of the UK Tory party book, decide a change of leadership is needed now, and it's game over for Yousaf. I think the sight of assorted Yoon parties launching VONC will prop up party discipline that wouldn't have necessarily been there - with the removal of Slater's fruit loops placating the most likely rebels too. The alternative of letting a handful of weirdos in sandals debate for weeks and then choose whether the SG is quite shite enough to leave remains the worse of the two possible options Yousaf faced by the start of the week.

Livingston will be struggling to field a team at tier 2 unless their legal saga about ownership somehow works in their favour. Absolutely no chance that their Walter Mitty model could be relied on to maintain a B team outside the top flight.

If so then I would wholeheartedly applaud this long-form shithousery as the best thing to happen in Scottish football since Rangers died. Frame and hang the notifying letter of Buckie's ineligibility in the Louvre.

I'm sure this 10th hot take of yours in the past 24 hours will pan out better than all the previous ones.

Scenes.

NHS GP practices. Today is the second time this week and what feels like the 17th time this year that the GP practice has called and left a voicemail that contains... err, no worthwhile information other than to 'contact the practice'. Cue ominous music. Then you set time aside during working hours to call back and wait on hold as the automated message runs through all 800 variants of trying to palm you off elsewhere. Then you get through, confirm all your details with the receptionist, who then discloses from Fort Knox... a completely routine update about a appointment/prescription that would have taken 0.04 seconds to fire off by email - with an option to respond at your own time too. The term 'Byzantine' doesn't work because theirs was the height of organisational skill in a world of dungheap barbarians. The NHS is run according to the whims of stupid boomers who have had 25 years to learn how a computer works but demand that everything still revolves around their ignorance.

Who needed last week's title decider when this duel of minter club statements between Buckie and Brechin could have been served up instead.

Shame, I'm sure that seemed like a real zinger in your head too.

The existence of automatic relegation spots is completely and utterly irrelevant to your claim that setting minimum criteria for promotion is against the premise of a pyramid league system. No matter how many times you try and flail towards *whatever* point you're hoping to achieve here.

Erm yes because Team Continuity Nicola has done such a sterling job of running the show.

The comparison being that the English pyramid system has also excluded play-off entrants just this week for failing to meet the criteria to step up to a higher level. The play-offs will continue without the excluded club - just as the SPFL play-off will continue with the club eligible to move up. Thanks for playing anyway - looking forward to your next tinfoil hat meltdown already.

Which is completely irrelevant to your tantrum about entry standards being applied to clubs being promoted.

Well no, because a pyramid structure is not in fact intended to provide automatic progression between levels. It is only there to provide the opportunity for progression - subject to criteria. Which is why the English pyramid has similarly excluded a league club from play-offs at tier 5. So long as the criteria are proportionate and clearly set out then it's in no way a contradiction to require minimum standards for progression. The bigger issue is that minimum standards weren't put in place sooner and aren't applied to homeless clubs. This would stop Cove and Edinburgh stinking out the SPFL with their unfit ground and unfit club/business model/ground respectively. And the criteria should also be used to chuck out those within the SPFL who don't get their house in order too.

Why has the final showdown not been scheduled for next Saturday - is it due to cup progression from this weekend's games?

Why is it crap for them? Unlike the pyramid anorak brigade who obsess about ventilation!!!111!!! on this website, I really doubt that Huntly and Largs fans really define their seasons by whether a completely different club gets promoted or not to a different league.

You're fooling absolutely no-one with that spin.

Can you identify where in the BHA it stated that the SNP would ignore an objective fact-based review of child healthcare provision if the conclusions don't match up with Greens' garbage identity politics hot take? Seems a kinda strange thing to bake into a deal nearly three years beforehand.

Nice try at repackaging your party statement from earlier in the day, but requiring one vote to survive a single confidence vote is really not a worse position to be in than having Lorna fucking Slater stinking out your Cabinet all the way until the next election because of Nicola's dodgy deal. Or having an EGM of a handful of fruit-loops decide whether your government retains its majority or not. Yousaf was mistaken to stand up for the BHA earlier in the week but gunging the Greens first was a competent response to events, which suggests that an adult was also present in the room last night.

There's nothing wrong with a manager having a clear Plan A; there's everything wrong with a manager who doesn't have a Plan B. It's also an insult even to the limited intelligence of many professional footballers to believe that They Cannot Possibly Cope with having two fundamentally different tasks to do. They do it all the time when on international duty or whenever they move from one club to a new one. It's just coaching narcissism.

Literally a punt over the top catching out these absolute jobbers.