LongTimeLurker

Find someone who actually cares about the senior vs junior divide if you want an argument on that point. The north clubs are definitely needed before you can claim to have Scotland's premier nonleague competition given the quality of clubs like Brora and Brechin City. According to a WoS officeholder who posts on here that angle is currently being addressed in pyramid related meetings and the LL, SoS and EoS are on board with the concept of a national rather than south cup as the main flagship competition.

Whatever bud. Try finding someone who actually cares about the senior vs junior divide if you want a time-wasting argument. It's all just football as far as I am concerned.

Don't the north clubs need to be factored in before you can make that sort of statement? Hopefully all the usual lunatic blazer politics will be resolved and there will be a single premier national cup for all of the non-league pyramid from next season onwards. Can understand why there is regionalisation but more WoS vs EoS ties would have helped add a bit of spice to this round.

Which would have been a better scenario in economic terms than the one that would have to unfold now, so if many swing voters saw it that way and didn't find hard border scenarios credible it may be more difficult to convince that portion of the electorate to take the plunge next time around using pragmatic arguments that now have to revolve around a seperate currency and a customs union type land border at the Solway and Tweed as the final destination rather than all of the British Isles being in the EU. There is a school of thought out there at the moment that the reason Boris & Co are kicking up a fuss about the NIP right now is that it is actually working too well for NI from their standpoint in a way that will help to highlight what a huge mistake Brexit was for the rest of the UK. Meanwhile the DUP are doing what they need to do to try to claw back support from TUV among the 30% or so of visceral level Unionists in NI electoral terms who were never going to be comfortable with customs checks at Larne, but the flip side to all this is that being fully open to goods from the EU but also to services & government subsidy from the UK isn't necessarily the scenario that makes a rapid move to UI look good in pragmatic terms to SDLP and SF voters in NI unlike what could have happened with a no deal Brexit.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that Switzerland is part of the EU's single market and Schengen due to a deal signed after a failed entry referendum. The rational outcome in a similar vein would simply be UK reentry to the EU but that's probably not happening for another generation because if/when it does get back on the political agenda the terms probably won't be as flexible as previously on the opt outs on integration that even a sizable chunk of Remain voters were supportive of. An angle that often gets overlooked in all of this is that an EU without the UK is nothing like as good for the RoI's corporation tax escapades as an EU with the UK in place acting as a handbrake on deeper integration and maintaining close ties to the United States: https://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-ireland-uk-border-trade/ In 2014, independence meant leaving the EU with no guaranteed route back and the likelihood of having a new Scottish currency and a relatively hard border at the Solway and Tweed despite what Alex was saying. Now a pathway to the single market and eventual EU entry would probably be a relative skoosh so the second part of that equation is less daunting than the prospect of being left on the outside of both the UK and EU markets to discourage separatist movements elsewhere was last time around, but there are still issues involved that could be a tough sell on the doorstep.

Resorting to ad hominens is usually a sign that you are unable to address the core point being made. To recap that was that the second best outcome for the sparser populated peripheral northern and western portions of the British Isles to still having unhindered access in economic terms to both the wider EU market and the very large England&Wales one in the immediate vicinity (i.e what would have happened if the UK had told Nigel Farage to do one and remained part of the EU) could wind up being NI's have your cake and eat it too status as the only part of the UK to still effectively be in the EU's single market. Jury is still out on that one as a lot depends on how problematic the Irish Sea customs checks wind up being in practice so only time will tell obviously.

Not sure what to make of a media landscape in which: (i) the finally difficult to hide crisis in the global supply of cheap easily exploitable fossil fuels with high EROEI now fracking is understood on Wall St to be a financial bust, (ii) grid parity for renewables achieved so that most new electricity generation capacity is based on that globally with several grid scale storage solutions at an advanced stage of development, (iii) EV sales based on Li ion battery technology possibly entering S-curve growth over the next decade, do not lead media commentators to ask some serious questions about whether Greta & Co maybe need to calm down a wee bit and move out of a pre-2007 credit crunch Al Gore vs Dubya era timewarp in which (i)-(iii) were not even close to being applicable yet. If you dumb down complex problems to a level understandable to people with an IQ of 90 and a faith rather than reason based way of looking at the world you wind up with a narrative that is tunnel-visioned and siloed away from reality.

He needed to get different actors with the right sorts of accent to make something like that actually work. The combination of an RoI accent and a Rangers jersey just comes across as seriously bizarre. A pro-reentry Scotland still having a land border with a pro-Brexit rUK complicates moving out in a potentially actually needing a passport to cross a hard border at Carlisle sort of way and it's far from impossible that a revised NI protocol will ultimately prove to be advantageous to NI in a best of both worlds sort of way, so the future isn't as inevitable as this guy is implying. Also not true to say NI was never wanted. Even the Liberals back in 1912 never envisaged an Ireland completely outside the UK and Empire but wanted a rejigged federal or confederal arrangement with Scotland and Wales also having Home Rule.

Go back a few pages and you'll find posts about it.

Jim O'Donnell of the Evening Times (used to play for the Accies and con refs into awarding lots of penalties with Oscar worthy diving?) doesn't seem to have got the memo about next year's Holy Grail being opened up to all nonleague pyramid clubs regardless of SJFA membership: ...Those options clearly include launching an appeal against this SJFA ruling with the aim of being reinstated however what cannot be ruled out is the festering discontent felt within the Southside club over their punishment, resulting in Pollok resigning their SJFA membership and becoming ineligible to participate in the Holy Grail tournament ever again.

Taken the hint that they should field more younger players for the experience against LL opponents rather than potentially messing up the Club 42 playoff by trying to win the division outright? The truth is out there...

Still no replay listed on the SJFA: https://www.scottishjuniorfa.com/scottish-junior-cup/fixtures/ Irvine Vics: https://www.irvinevictoriafc.co.uk/fixtures/1025 or Pollok website: https://www.pollokfc.com/fixtures-and-results/

^^^

This will be to avoid a clash with the senior Scottish Cup. Assume the same will happen with Lochee United vs BoD.

Another Bosnian song but from the 80s about looking back wistfully at her youth. The singer Hanka Paldum is not to be messed with as she is arguably most famous in recent years for being sued by a Bosnian Serb ex-POW who she allegedly booted very hard in the haw maws to his permanent injury something she vehemently denies. prefer this one from Dubioza kolektiv complete with a Josip Broz Tito impersonation threatening to send all the leaders from the ex-Yu to an island prison from the 1950s for messing up his old country and then doing a U-turn and saying he was only joking and who gives a flying one about the plebs: or this one where a rakija fueled Lada is used by the Bosnian Space Agency:

BUs game in the second round isn't going to be the televised one:

Lothian Thistle Hutchison Vale are the Ainslie Park tenant for Saturday fixtures. Edinburgh City thought they were getting back to Meadowbank in time for the start of the season and then found they could only get back into Ainslie Park on Friday evenings when that turned out not to be the case. LTHV are away to Dunbar United in the second round though so that isn't the direct cause on the 23rd.

My understanding is they had to nominate Friday evening for this entire season.

They play their league home games on Fridays evenings so that's probably correct. It might be one of the first games played at the new Meadowbank stadium.