Skeletar Spider

Caught in possession and then immediately loses out in the 50/50 leading to Thistle's second on Saturday. I've been pretty impressed with Spong, and obviously individual mistakes will happen, but I've not seen enough yet to suggest he's an upgrade on Boateng.

If by 'hipster' you mean folk with hip replacements, then I imagine it would be pretty accurate for us.

I have a pretty reliable source on this, and there's no one in our squad on anything like that sort of money.

When did that happen?

I was there for six years and never saw one, but that was a fair few years ago now...

We had stewards asking us to sit down literally within seconds of us standing up to clap two weeks ago. Another thing I don't understand is why there have to be so fucking many of them.

I believe it's just shy of 1,000.

Really sharp from Hepburn for the first goal. You see him immediately sprinting forward as soon as Paton wins the flick-on, probably not thinking the defender's going to slip up but making sure he's there in case he does. Then once he's got the ball he's got his head up right away, sees Thomas, and the pass is perfect. Robson deserves a lot of credit for his goal as well. Yes it's poor defending, but he shows the sort of composure a lot of strikers lack in that situation. Robson's frustrating as a player because he'll put in a string of great performances then go weeks where he really struggles, but with Bruce breathing down his neck this season he'll know that he's got to keep his performance levels up.

...probably best just to leave it here.

https://news.stv.tv/sport/queens-park-kicked-out-of-scottish-cup-for-fielding-ineligible-player

Still doesn't make us even for the cup last season.

Can't say I expected this, but to be 2-0 up already is some going.

Assuming you keep 'Max Ram' on the bench.

Absolutely no idea how this will turn out, but the paper thin squad and the prospect of Louis Longride at right-back - who's admittedly looked half decent in the couple of games I've seen him in, albeit against lower division teams - are not concerns you want to have going into a new campaign. Would like to see McKenna, Bruce and Healy all start. If we're going to go with this youth gimmick then we may as well do it properly.

They came closer than anyone else to building a football stadium, falling just three stands, decent eyelines, normal acoustics, and having the area behind the goal cleared of rubble short, so I guess they've earned the right to name the thing.

Wait, it's supposed to be a stadium?

If he is away, then I can only assume we're close to bringing another striker in. Even if Veldman does rate McLeish, that leaves us with just one back-up to Paton - or two if you count former Our Lady of the Missions Primary star Rocco Hickey-Fugaccia - which is asking for trouble.

I'd be surprised if he scored many goals in League One, still think that might be too high a level for him, but would be perfectly happy to be proven wrong.

That's a good point: experience counts for nothing if you don't have the ability. At the same time, I'd like to think we wouldn't pass up on the opportunity to sign a player because they don't meet our self-imposed age criteria. But I guess that's the direction the club is moving in at the moment.

Obviously it's about striking a balance, but the team needs to be competitive if young players are going to flourish at this level, and I'm worried there's not enough experience for that to be the case.

There might be a lot more tactical analysis, but whether or not that has any bearing on how the team actually performs remains to be seen. I would agree that we were awful in the last third of last season, but saying the right things in interviews isn't necessarily a sign that we're going to improve.

I'm not expecting us to challenge this season. If we can establish ourselves as a Championship side, be in with a shout of a (promotion) play-off place into the second half of the campaign and bring some youth players through then I'll consider it to have been a success. My worry is that unless we strengthen the squad and bring in at least a couple of players with some experience of playing at this level then we'll be scrapping it out at the bottom of the table and could well go down.

He literally has his own dugout at the new Lesser Hampden.

Might be a better fit from a PR perspective, but Coyle's team won 17 league games last season and were a half away from winning the title. Nothing I've seen in the past couple of games (I wasn't at East Fife or Motherwell) suggests we're going to be anything close to that this season.

Out of interest, where are we going to be playing our home games in the coming years?