Tulloch Gorum

Lionel Messi is one of the greatest players - if not the greatest player - ever to play the game. He has left many, many better players than Scott Brown on their arses and/or eating his dust over the years. Has Brown achieved as much from his career as he could have done? No, probably not. But it's not all down to ambition, someone said upthread there were difficult family circumstances that had a bearing on his decision, and if that's the case then fair play to him. It's a job. Nobody would think the worse of someone in any other line of work staying near their family in similar circumstances even if better career progression was on offer elsewhere. It's a job, some things are more important than that. He's obviously settled at a club that suits him, he's made bags of money and has a heap of medals to tell his grandkids about. Hard to blame him too much for that. I'm all for players heading elsewhere where they can learn more and develop into better players - we've seen with Tierney over the last year how good it can be for them. But at the end of the day these are guys with a job, and like everyone in every job the choice to move or stay put has a lot of factors to consider.

Oh, you get that on the Airdrie thread as well. I imagine all clubs have that going on around them. Hutton is a good signing for you. His judgement at crosses can be a bit suspect at times, and does occasionally lose the rag if thinks he's been wronged, but a better shot stopper you could not ask for. I think all Airdrie fans would have been happy to have kept him, but he wants regular football and nobody can begrudge him that. He'd been replaced as first choice keeper this year, but that penalty save at Celtic Park in the Cup has made him something of a cult hero.

If that's indeed so then it's good news for Airdrie. He's been impressive.

Tae buy oor Tam Rab any other club would need many spundoolicks. His contract, it seems, is longer than all assumed. A wily ploy, that! (I just figured not enough chat here utilises the haiku form)

Possibly. Bad luck for them in that case that Galloway can't so much as fart without tweeting about what a heroic stance he's taking in doing so.

We all miss seeing our clubs, we all miss seeing the regulars at the games. We all spent time on Christmas talking to on the phone to family who would otherwise have been there, we'll all be doing the same again on Hogmanay and Ne'er Day. We've all ploughed thousands into our clubs over the years, I'm sure. I miss going to the cinema, I miss going to my church, I miss going to parents' for tea every few weeks, I miss visiting my friends. We all do. But we all have make sacrifices because there's a highly contagious disease spreading like wildfire that's killed thousands in this country already, and it's better to miss those things than to lose them forever because of Covid. So we grumble a bit, we pay for our livestreamed games and we put up with it on the understanding that if everyone does, then we have those things back sooner or later. It needs trust and solidarity across the country or it doesn't work. It needs trust and solidarity or it's just millions of people feeling lonely and miserable for no reason. Before he decided that the breathing binfires that are union flag twitter das were the easiest group to grift and he decided to fully embrace reactionary nationalism, George Galloway was something of a socialist. He's probably given a few speeches about solidarity in his time. But he's behaving just like the Marquis of Bute here, who has just been in the news for hosting private parties. They're indistinguishable, really - they're big and (self) important, so the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to them. And for some bizarre reason we should be grateful to them for it, and not be so rude as to question it. And that's before getting to that club statement, which is just atrocious. When a team is doing that badly on the park, its board need all the goodwill from the fans they can get.

Clyde were absolutely dire today. In the first half they did have the wind to contend with, but they were so sloppy at the back that had it been a still day we'd still have been ahead. From the time we scored our first to their first they barely got a kick of the ball. Therir defence was comical, with two bad backpasses that nearly let in our strikers, and another from about thirty yards out that went for a corner - and that's without account of the goals. The first and third were pretty spectacular from an Airdrie point of view, but nobody should be letting in goals direct from corners, and the amound of time and space Kerr had was pub-league stuff. Given Airdrie's habit of late collapses in recent years I wasn't all that comfortable being just two goals up going into the final stages, but bar a brief flurry of corners and free kicks following their second goal Clyde never looked like mounting much a serious late effort and seemed to have pretty much given up by the last ten. i don't know what scope Clyde have for strengthening in January, but they'll be really struggling if they don't, especially at the back. No senior team should be losing those kinds of goals, and certainly not nine goals in two games to an Airdrie side who are decent going forward but hardly prolific. For us, I thought Thomson had a decent game, though the conditions made the second half a bit of a slog for us going forward. It's good to see Roy back as well, especially if Connell ends up going back to Kilmarnock. Granted they were mostly friendlies, but Roy had hit a good run of form before his injury, and competition for places can only be a good thing. My stream had frozen when Clyde got their second - can anyone give a good description of it? Having gotten ourselves into a really strong position we did let Clyde get if not back into the game at least within touching distance of it, but really we saw the second half out pretty much as comfortably as could be managed in that wind. I dread to think how much worse the conditions would have been before the building at the formerly open end was put up. It would have been nigh-unplayable in the days before the South Stand.

I don't really see what there is to argue about with this draw. Denmark and Austria are obviously better than us, but if we ever want to get to a World Cup again - and do anything worthwhile once there - then obviously we need to beat superior teams now and then. If you don't think you can do that at least some of the time, during a good run that gets you a fighting chance, you're as well not playing.

It's true that Roy wasn't up to much last year, but to be fair to him he had clearly hit a good run of form, albeit mostly in friendlies, before he got injured. I would take Robert over Smith for sure, for the other new ones the jury is out for me. Sabatini is clearly a very skillful player, but whether its the system we're playing, him not clicking with the players around him or his own limitations, he doesn't seem to have much influence on the game.

That was dire. That's two games now with hardly a worthwhile chance created between them. It's so frustrating because these players are clearly good enough to do so much better, it's maddening to watch the side that ran five past Clyde and blew Forfar way in the first half up there look so insipid and toothless against sides that are decent and well-organised but hardly a terrifying prospect to face.

Not sure I would agree with that. Did he not score in three consecutive games before the EF game? We spent most of last season bemoaning our lack of attacking creativity, he's got it in spades.

No, not playing like that, obviously. Playing like they did against Clyde and Forfar and the second half against Cove. I think we'll see more like that, but we'll also see more of what we had today and against Dumbarton.

That was really poor today. Really struggled to keep possession or do anything with it, no real creativity and hardly any serious chances created. It's so frustrating because we have players that can do all of those things. This team should finish in the top four comfortably enough, but it's hard to see them being good enough consistently enough to mount any kind of serious title challenge. Bah humbug.

I believe it may well be a load of Jim White.

Has anyone suggested Donald Trump for the job yet? He's needing a new gig, and his messianic delusions about his own greatness and exeptional brilliance will go down well there.

Big snottery OF tantrums are always funny to watch, whichever side it is. It's been pointed out before, but both sets of their fans think they couldn't possibly be more different, but to the rest of the country they couldn't possibly be more similar.

Cove certainly outplayed us in the first half, no question about that, but how many chances did they create? I missed the first five minutes or so, but I don't remember Currie having an awful lot saves to make.

Aye, they're away to Dumbarton - I think the game was off due to a waterlogged pitch the week before we played them (which was of course moved to Airdrie for the same reason). Getting into winter Dumbarton must be at risk of piling up a few postponed games and having to squeeze them all into a relatively short space of time because of the shortened season.

Forfar look so fragile at the back, like Bambi skiting aboot the ice. It was a sloppy goal for us to lose, but hard to complain about the first half so far.

Just about nothing I am ever likely to experience in my life would make me as happy as scudding them down there. Absolute scenes. Cannot wait.

Likewise!

Long out of greenies, but that was excellent. Being at the banquet is something I can remember from '98, my brother barely can. Just the idea that Scotland were part of that. Not just the actual football, at which most teams at most tournaments don't make much of an impact - but all the colourful stuff around it. Carlos Valderrama with his eccentric hair, tiny wee Jorge Campos with his bizarre jerseys, the Romanians all bleaching their hair (when I was a student I had a girlfriend from Romania, who said that all the boys at her primary school came in with bleached hair the very next day) - well, much as people love cringing about it for some reason, the kilts and the pipes were part of that as well, just as much as samba drums and all the weird costumes and get-up folk had on at other games. The opening game of the tournament was us against the best team in the world - for a 9-year-old me, the best team that could be imagined: Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos, Cafu, Rivaldo - they were playing against Jim Leighton and Tom Boyd and Colin Hendry and yes they beat us but we weren't disgracced at all (that came later). The whole world was watching John Collins score a goal aginst he best team on the planet. And all that - along with World Cup and Scotland branding on every box of cereal and every advert and sticker books and tournament guide magazines and everything - that's all really vivid in my memory as a nine year old kid. But that's the one and only set of memories I have like that. Next year, granted it's the Euros and not the World Cup, I will have another set to add to them. My nephews will experience that, though one of them is still probably too young to get much of it. And I can't feckin wait.

I still can't quite believe it, far less forma coherent paragraph. It's just a thousand little fragments in my head, among them: - spraying greenies around like water from a hose. Admins, gie's mair. - I was 9 when Scotland last played at a tournament, my younger brother barely remembers it. I cut my heid open on the mantlepiece jumping around when Collins scored against Brazil, and cried when Morocco scudded us. - That summer everything everywhere was Scotland-branded. I remember a pub having a window with a painting of Hendry lifting the World Cup trophy, it was just everwhere. My nephews will get that next summer. We've just missed out on all that goofy brilliant fun for so long. - Scotland are brilliant. - What exactly is it about penalties that England finds so difficult? - Every cringing yoon trying to make this about Jo feckin Swinson and how we should feel sorry for her can get in the bin. And they can stay there, because they are *not* going to like Scotish Twitter when we stuff those Morris-dancing Nigels in London next summer. - We've had decades of failure. Some of it was called glorious failure, sometimes it was utterly abject, usually it was just regular failure. Last night we didn't fail. - Football programmes on radio won't be running their traditional gloomy post-mortems. P&B won't be hosting its traditional Our Players Are Shite vs. No The Managers Are Too Shite To Get The Best Out Of Them debates that we all enjoy so very very much. - I have never been more certain of impending defeat than I was going to extra time. We had absolutely Scotlanded it with another late goal, and Serbia were all set to just run right over the top of us. Which they more or less did for the first 15. - I really wish I could read Serbian so I could rubberneck their message boards and just bask in the seethe, They must be absolutely disgusted at how they played last night, and how - with all the momentum and sprin in their step against a deflated Scotland in extra time - they couldn't land the knockout blow. From the team that did so well against Norway in the semi, that must have been hard to watch. - YASSSSS, just generally. - What a magnificent job Clarke has done. Just exactly the right man to build the team in the right way. - My family moved to Scotland in 2002. I grew up abroad, but we came back to Scotland on home leave every few years (hence being here for the '98 WC). We came back in very traumatic circumstances. It happened that the day after we arrived in Scotland was the infamous game against the Faroe Islands. We were all jetlagged and sleeping at whatever time the game was. My dad got up and put the TV on to check the score, and saw we were 2-0 down. He didn't have the heart to wake us up to watch that after what we'd been through. Scotland had entered a Dark Age. So many awful, awful games since then - 0-0 in Moldova, 0-3 in Kazakhstan, Iwelumo's miss against Norway, getting utterly turned over by Wales and Hungary, melting in Macedonia and collapsing in Georgia. The glorious highlights - France, the Netherlands, Ukraine, getting snuffed out. And now we've done it. We've done it, we've qualified and at the end of this utter sewer of a year, we've got something we can just enjoy. - I've only been to a couple of friendly matches, never a competitive Scotland game. The first was the 1-0 win over Denmark, which probably almost everyone there has already forgotten. It was a pretty a dire game, but seeing all the banners for Scotland Supporters' Clubs and pub groups from... Oban, Kirkwall, Aberdeen, Perth, East Lothian, Ayr, Lewis - it was really amazing. Those who go to national games all the time maybe take that for granted, but as someone who pretty much only sees games between Airdrie and other equally diddy teams, the feeling that you had people representing the whole country, coming from all over the place just to be there together and watch the national team was really quite powerful. And that was just a meangingless friendly, not especially well-attended or exciting. The national team really does bring the country together, and I can't wait for that happen to next summer.

cannae thole this

scunner