LongTimeLurker

Amateur club was Lowson United who took over Forfar Albion and changed their name. Forfar Albion themselves were an amalgamation of Forfar East End and Forfar Celtic around 1970 or so when the old county leagues merged to form the Tayside setup and three Forfar junior clubs would have been overkill.

Plenty of lower division junior level type games have 1 ref and two club linesmen. That would need to be an SPFL regulation.

Saw the 4-0 scoreline and thought this is going to be a long season. Checked back 30 minutes later...

Yes that was the plan at one point and it may even have been as low as 10 clubs in the Gordon Smith era, but eventually Stewart Regan & co stopped pushing that and let them do their own thing on the league size issue and the possibility of ever having tier 6 feeder leagues to help persuade them to clamber on board. Getting to where things are now has involved a major sea change of opinion amongst HL member clubs.

No doubt there was contact but the NCL guy from Tain St Duthus seemed a bit bewildered by it all on twitter.

Their manager (?) rolling up to Cove Rangers' ground and wanting a square go with the chairman was a particularly amusing anecdote about what may or may not have happened in the aftermath. Since then though they definitely appear to be happy where they are. If the Midlands League hadn't crashed the party at the very last minute after Forfar West End's EoS application it's questionable how much pro/rel was actually likely to happen any time soon. Don't think there's any doubt that Lochee United are gung ho about it, so if/when they move up the other larger Tayside clubs are likely to want to follow.

...more like a decade at a minimum on sorting everything out on natural levels given there is a bottleneck on promotion into tier 5 and then the SPFL.

The clubs you would most expect to be chasing the title have been dropping points as well so not too much damage done by the first three games if the team start to gel at this point.

https://www.scottishjuniorfa.com/east-region/

The BBC article doesn't provide all the back story. During WWII the pro-Axis Croatian nationalist Ustase regime ran a concentration camp for ethnic Serbs from the surrounding area in Tesla's native village and destroyed the house he was born in so there are reasons this sort of stuff can open up very raw emotions for some people.

Are Fort William not viewed as an unwelcome intrusion into shinty territory by some of the locals? There's likely to be deeper reasons like that why a Lochaber team didn't work out as well in an HL context as Wick Academy did in Caithness. It's good there is finally a pyramid so clubs find their proper level. Season after season of getting annihilated doesn't do anyone involved any good.

Don't see that mentioned in any of the statements and newspaper articles. Are you sure that isn't just people online assuming that will be what happens?

If other clubs are keeping entry money and game day revenues and are only providing the money they would have spent for a bus to FW in exchange for hosting the game that isn't necessarily as generous as it appears at first glance.

I guess the HFL are probably hoping Fort William withdraw outright at this point but didn't want to actively push them over the edge. They better check they have done a better job of defining "bottom club" in their constitution where relegation issues are concerned than the LL did.

No people are saying they won't necessarily do what they are intended to do if they are not being worn, taken off and washed correctly and making them mandatory is somewhat futile if/when that is what is happening.

What percentage of people are actually wearing masks properly and are taking them off and cleaning them correctly? It's basically futile to mandate it if most people are not doing it correctly which is why WHO recommended against them in the pandemic protocols that got discarded pretty much everywhere other than Sweden. The false sense of security they provide to a large percentage of people wearing them under their nose for comfort reasons can cancel out any net benefits.

10 days after dose 1 you are supposed to be fine on hospitalisation and death against all known variants barring severe comorbidities. 10 days after dose 2 means you are much less likely to be even mildly symptomatic if infected. Natural immunity from prior infection is stronger in immune system response terms especially if combined with two doses of Pfizer/AZ so Boris and Nicola letting rip on case numbers may be about an unstated goal of building even stronger overall herd immunity before new variants emerge from elsewhere.

I agree in broad hypothetical terms but that sort of analysis really isn't applicable to NI though. For example, in Belfast the Shankill and the Falls were and are much of a muchness in terms of housing conditions and deprivation levels. Although the inhabitants of the former were favoured for certain industrial sector jobs if you went back a few decades, they were also usually about as welcome as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip in a wide range of other better paying ones for British class system based reasons. Any sensible class based analysis of the island of Ireland in the 20th century both north and south would have to acknowledge that the dominance of 17th century inspired constitutional politics helped the property owning elite defend their class interests against working class ones whether that be through the RoI's Tweedledum vs Tweedledee FF vs FG politics or through the UUP one party state at Stormont. James Connolly's Easter Rising participation was disastrous for the future prospects of socialism in other words. In both post-partition statelets there was rampant discrimination against those who were perceived to be of the wrong persuasion in sky fairy worship terms or whose face didn't fit politically or for class based reasons with emigration being the usual solution. Anyone from a working class background with a bit of get up and go usually got up and went. Things have moved on now since EEC entry in the 70s and Maggie T in the 80s but direct rule from Westminster and post-WWII British socialism would have been a better outcome than that for promoting working class interests.

Hope the unwelcome lodgers fold soon but it is mildly amusing that the Real BUs vs Atletico BUs patter on here appears to have helped inspire their name.

Think there was a full-time clubs colt teams in the HL angle to the latest proposal that got knocked back. The Old Firm angle is what drives most of the opposition. Nobody seems to be losing any sleep on here over Nairn County having a colt team in the North Caledonian League at tier 6.

You have fundamentally misunderstood the point Jacksgranda was making.

Can't have a more nuanced and complex picture of what happened in NI from 1921-72 as that messes up the overly simplistic narrative that's been drummed into our heads. At no point will we ever consider whether direct rule from Whitehall with the mainstream British Labour party representing working class interests might have been better than what unfolded and examine why that didn't happen and why the UUP elite were allowed instead to do what they did by Westminster for so many decades until all the social tensions that had built up boiled over in 30 years of mayhem.

Working class Protestants were all rich, had well-paying jobs and lived in big houses in NI from 1921-72 unlike their working class Roman Catholic neighbours and were not in any way marginalised by what is sometimes laughingly referred to as "big house Unionism" whose leaders had not become in any way estranged from street level reality. Everything was basically wonderful in Belfast in the swinging 60s under Cpt Terence O'Neill until big bad Ian Paisley got all uppity and started brainwashing the gullible urban lumpen proles and rural Presbyterian peasantry about a sectarian divide that the UUP elite had not in fact in any way exploited to create their effective one party state. It is completely mystifying why this segment of the population would not have trusted people like Brian Faulkner to look after their interests over something like Sunningdale. This has been a documentary brought to you by Peter Taylor of the BBC that will shape perceptions across the wider UK...

That's what a poster on NLM was saying recently: https://www.nonleaguematters.co.uk/forums/index.php?threads/possible-new-dundee-junior-senior-team.4008/ Think it was St Joseph's ground and Elmwood would maybe just have been there on a groundshare similar to later with East Craigie?

...but there weren't many places that were at the time. Nationalists were being elected to Stormont and controlled certain local councils where Londonderry style gerrymandering was impossible and the Northern Ireland Labour Party were often able to beat the UUP in parts of Belfast with cross-community support. Stormont started off with an STV PR system in the 1920s that would have made that a recipe for competitive elections with scope for changes of power. The UUP should never have been allowed to move away from that as Westminster style FPTP from 1929 onwards was what allowed an effective one party UUP state to emerge. Having a single dominant party that never loses power is never healthy for democracy anywhere.