LongTimeLurker

I assume you are including People Before Profit to reach 41.9%? They don't actually sign up to the Nationalist label at Stormont as far as I'm aware although there's a reasonable enough case to be made that they are in practical terms. SDLP + SF had 39.8% of first preferences combined in 2017.

Not a huge fan of the late Seamus Mallon's politics but he was a thoroughly decent individual who summed up the sheer futility of what unfolded from1968-1997 with the phrase "Sunningdale for slow learners". Think people in this thread who are talking about large scale violence from the Unionist side in future need to get a grip. The RoI in 2021 is a very different place from what it was like in the late 1960s and early 70s or from what the Free State was like in the 1920s and 30s.

SF won't get anything even close to a majority of MLAs at the next election and will likely be in the 25-30% range. If they get the highest number it will only be because of how fractured the pro-Union vote is between the DUP, UUP, TUV and Alliance right now. Combined SF and the SDLP will only be at 40% or so on a good day for them (they were below that at the most recent Westminster election) given they are also bleeding some support to Alliance & co in the centre ground that reject both Nationalist and Unionist labels. Boris's Brexit was bad for Ulster Unionism long term but I wouldn't get too excited about a Border Poll and UI being just around the corner.

Probably just the guy who runs that website himself from past experience of the "open grade" and "Scottish national league" stuff he was banging on about 20 years ago. He posts on here occasionally (mick90 is what comes to mind as his username).

I guess having the dedicated dressing room and shower and toilet facilities for 4 officials and the stated size of home and away dressing rooms as being for 22 with five showers and two toilets or a toilet and urinal each is what can be problematic with grounds that were built in another era.

Seriously bizarre seeing Whitburn in this when most of their immediate neighbours in Conference X are doing the SJC, but not getting into a fankle over extra cup fixture dates probably makes sense if they see promotion as the most important thing to aim for this season. As long as they aren't drawn against clubs in the big Scottish Cup, I guess the non-AJC Conference X clubs will potentially be able to use AJC dates to play their SJC first and second round games other than Armadale and Bathgate who have a King Cup game on 7th August?

Interesting insight from elsewhere: https://nonleaguematters.co.uk/forums/index.php?threads/lowland-league-2021-2.4692/post-103766 The Lowland League used to subscribe to a system called we-soccer. Every club was issued with a device from which they were obliged to upload team lines, goals, cards and substitutions to the we-soccer website. Some teams did so assiduously. Some paid lip service to it. It is still on the Live Scores part of the LL website but no teams used it yesterday. The LL may try to give an impression of professionalism. The reality is different. Their corporate communication and PR is poor. That of clubs varies according to the availability of volunteers. When a club has no fan base then it will be hard to find anyone to look after that side of things, and that applies to half a dozen of their member clubs.

What would hinder Downfield and North End in licensing terms? If you have an enclosed ground with a wall around it, floodlights and cover for > 100 some of the most difficult boxes to achieve are already ticked.

Livescore has most of them: https://www.livescore.com/en/football/scotland/lowland-league/

Rangers B grabbed another late goal:

Unfortunately:

...you should maybe check out the sort of money Darvel are spending at the moment.

With Kelty gone and both BSC Alloa and the Shire apparently on significantly lower budgets, this may be the best season to really try to go for it before the top WoS clubs start to arrive. Just as the EoS promotion season was the ideal time to get the job done in the EoS before the promotion playoff became challenging rather than a formality.

Think you'll find improvements were happening anyway at clubs like Whitburn, Dyce and Broughty Athletic but it certainly didn't help. I've never really understood this deep junior vs senior tribalism that some people have on both sides. All just football as far as I'm concerned. All that's really needed now is some sanity on having a single prestige cup competition for tier 5 or 6 and down with Scottish in its name and not much will have changed for most present and former SJFA members that are unlikely to ever progress into the HL, LL or SPFL beyond catching up with the times on floodlights and fixture lists.

You know what that's all about and I know what that's all about but the BBC and others have not included it in the narrative that has shaped the general collective memory across the UK. Almost half a century on Fr James Chesney isn't around any more to publicly confess to his involvement and how and why his alleged role was covered up is not going to be the subject of a high profile public inquiry as it's still too hot to handle even now. Kathryn Eakin aged 9 cleaning the window of her family's shop and the other eight victims of the Provos (and the prominent figures from the other side of the border that had encouraged and facilitated their emergence) that day are therefore largely forgotten while people with a one-sided identity politics agenda and a penchant for highly selective moral outrage still drone on and on relentlessly about Bloody Sunday as if it's the only thing that happened during the Troubles.

Arguably it began in 2007 with junior clubs entering the Scottish Cup as that started to erode the concept of separate junior and senior grades: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/scot_cups/6711023.stm

One out of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday in 1972 was premeditated mass murder rather than a monumental cockup and breakdown of command and control. Strangely it's the one that hasn't been turned into a cause celebre by the international media.

Guess there can't have been any significant aggro on the 12th given the absence of recent posts from the usual suspects. Paul Givan's still in the job so looks like Jeffrey Donaldson was stuck with him for now after all and the stuff about him having to resign was mainly just a way to make the pecking order crystal clear.

...and expects to be taken seriously on that despite often highlighting that he is a former Trotskyite. Hasn't seemed to have let go of the notion that whatever type of politics he is currently aligned with is historically inevitable despite ditching Marxism for what he no doubt previously viewed as bourgeois nationalism.

Only likely to be in any way effective if worn properly and what percentage of the population was actually doing that?

...are self-selecting so may not be fully in tune with public opinion.

Is that not a big part of what he got right though? They aren't the worldbeaters their tabloid media think they are so the path to victory is to take more of a Greece in 2004 sort of approach than a Brazil in1982 one. Let's not forget it was alarmingly close to actually working for them.

It's all about testable models/theorems based on reason and reproducible data and over time as the measurements that can be made improve, the explanations provided can be a moving target. The problems start when you have something like future global temperatures or future coronavirus case number predictions where the models inherently have to extrapolate well beyond what can actually really be supported based on the available reproducible data. Then you can start to enter into clashes between politicised faith based or dogmatic belief systems especially if major policy decisions hinge upon the models predicting certain things. Pay no attention to that Swedish epidemiologist behind the curtain...

No sign of them having played any friendlies that I could find. Big question would be whether they lost any of the players they had announced as signing when the management team left?