LongTimeLurker

The SFA told Auchinleck Talbot at one point that they had to join the SoS if they wanted to get licensed. The SoS was being officially viewed as the west tier 6 league for a few years in the McRae/Regan era. East Kilbride joined the SoS before getting into the LL without ever playing a game in it and Caledonian Braves and Bonnyton got accepted later. A cynic might conclude that if Kelty hadn't upset the apple cart there were plenty of influential people in the Scottish game who would have been quite happy to see Junior football marginalised on an ongoing basis and permanently on the outside looking in where the pyramid is concerned. Personally think the sensible destination for West Lothian east region clubs (other than Harthill) is clearly the EoS, but don't see it as the end of civilisation as we have known it if the way the pyramid gets completed as soon as possible and with a minimum of fuss is by having them go west if WoS clubs are willing to take a few of them so the line winds up a few miles further east around Bathgate and Blackburn instead. Do the EoS really want the Armadale twitter guy at their AGMs in the years ahead? Might be better for both parties to avoid that scenario.

Not sure what to make of the BBC reporting that the Captain Sir Tom guy died "with coronavirus" after catching pneumonia rather than reporting it as another COVID-19 fatality as they almost certainly would in any other instance. Not a pleasant way to go so RIP and condolences and all that but weird how this is being spun.

No, because most people who felt very strongly about wanting to still be British could always leave for NI or elsewhere in the UK so that they could be, but Orange Order aligned candidates (i.e. basically UUP under a cover name) did quite well for several decades in local elections in Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan. The last county councillor of that type stopped getting elected in Donegal as recently as 20 years ago and there was an independent TD in Donegal still being elected on that sort of basis up to the 1960s. Crypto-Unionist votes often tend to go to Fine Gael and that has resulted in there often being a Protestant Fine Gael TD from Monaghan and Cavan. One of them called Billy Fox was shot dead by the IRA in the 1970s, which hints at why people have probably never been hugely keen to raise their head above the parapet in the RoI on an issue like reunification with the UK. Too many nutters around with access to firearms to make it worth putting up with the aggro associated with chasing a quixotic lost cause.

The bit of Lanarkshire that juts into West Lothian north of Harthill and the M8 takes the boundary to within a short stroll of both Whitburn (on the Harthill side of the M8 to the east around where the three roads meet) and Armadale (where the road top right crosses the railway line and stretches up along the road from there off the map). Fauldhouse also lies very close to the squiggly line around where the roads meet just north of the railway line towards the bottom of the graphic. The only community among the five being mentioned that is somewhat distant from it is Stoneyburn, which is off this map in the north east direction of Fauldhouse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneyburn

Kello Rovers are what probably complicated matters on defining everything strictly by local authority areas. Kirkconnel is significantly into Dumfries and Galloway, which is generally viewed as SoS territory. They would also have had to deal with the anomalies of Tweedmouth being on the wrong side of the Tweed in EoS terms and Caledonian Braves Reserves playing at Strathclyde Park in SoS terms. By the sounds of what has been posted on the EoS subforum Harthill have actually been in contact with a WoS official, so if they are still pursuing it there probably is no obstacle in terms of constitutions or agreements between leagues.

From what i remember there's a mention of local authorities covered in a vision statement in the preamble to the EoS one but nothing in the actual rules. patriot1 who is linked to St Andrews United has been posting regularly that EoS clubs were told last year after Luncarty got in that there were no geographical limits on who can apply to the EoS and have their application voted on by the existing members.

Yes, they are technically really a Greenrigg club as that's what the West Lothian part of Harthill is called. Their ground is on the opposite side of the main street from Greenrigg right next to where Harthill proper starts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenrigg Most of Harthill is in Lanarkshire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harthill,_Scotland Given Clydebank were trying to get into the EoS at one point and even received provisional membership, Clydebank fans are maybe not the best people to be championing where a fixed boundary should be on this but can understand why the Armadale twitter guy would still be viewed negatively.

The 500 lb gorilla in the room on this is the SJFA membership and SJC participation angle. Doable as a WoS club, but not as an EoS club as things stand at the moment. Up until the very last PWG meeting attended by Tom Johnston as recently as a year ago the west region clubs were still backing the SJFA's all regions in at the same time agenda, so how the WoS handles this is more of an unknown quantity than it would be with the EoS. Would there be WoS clubs that still care enough about the junior vs senior angle to be willing to let the West Lothian five in so they can retain their SJFA membership like they did or would Armadale and Stoneyburn simply be viewed as too much of a trek for an early midweek kickoff if you are in Ayrshire or the far side of Glasgow? Time will tell I guess.

If Tayport is defined as a Tayside club, it's worth bearing in mind that they are known to be planning on putting an application in.

I'd look closely at Harthill though. Most of the town is in Lanarkshire, but their ground is a literal stone's throw into West Lothian on the Greenrigg side. The rest are unambiguosly West Lothian with only Fauldhouse having any history (pre-WWII) of local clubs ever playing in Lanarkshire leagues.

Guess it depends on whether most WoS clubs are still SJFA orientated at this point or not. A majority did retain their membership but it's probably a mistake to read too deeply into that.

Fauldhouse also mentioned in another message from the same poster.

So in summary five southwestern West Lothian clubs (Fauldhouse, Harthill, Armadale, Staneyburn and Whitburn) plus Kilbride Thistle could explain the six WoS applicants mentioned on the Kilwinning Rangers twitch?

Only seeing this now. Not exactly a shock for anyone who knows the score. The revelations made during the arms crisis of 1970 already made it abundantly clear who was behind the emergence of the Provos and why. No secret on who later offered them sanctuary with no risk of extradition and never seemed to be able to locate any of their arms caches. Chances this will ever get picked up by Fleet Street? Slim to none. They only ever seem to care about Bloody Sunday.

Unionism winning a border poll (still a lot more likely than not for tribal headcount reasons) means that there can't be another one for another 7 years (an analogy that the Conservatives strangely never seem to want to use in the context of the timing of a second Scottish independence referendum). Not sure that's a long enough gap to make it worth the risk from a Unionist standpoint. Think it's better to wait and hope Brexit related trade issues get fixed over time.

Genuinely expected this today and was disappointed when Accies lost to them midweek. How on earth is Lennon still in a job?

...but mysteriously still seem to cope with Ebola outbreaks. Have you ever actually been to Africa? Your comment might be applicable to somewhere war torn like South Sudan or Somalia but is completely bizarre in the context of somewhere like Botswana or Kenya.

They have fridges in Africa and access to hypodermic needles and syringes. Pfizer and Moderna would have been problematic but Sinovac and Sputnik should be OK.

Sinovac and Sputnik won't be used much in first world countries but it's a mistake to think only Europe and the United States have vaccines on the go that will be produced in the billion range on doses this year. India also has Oxford AZ ramping up in production terms in a big way to that sort of scale right now. Once J&J, Novavax and Valneva etc arrive on the scene western countries will have more doses ordered than they know what to do with. There's resons for optimism.

Probably as I doubt they are monitoring P&B, but will be interesting to see how Labour handles this. In tune with their values or just another bunch of selfish nationalists once you move beyond some empty rhetoric?

Doing a Norway with slightly fewer deaths than 2019 according to some sources online but doubt this will be getting any mainstream media converage in the UK any time soon and there are obvious reasons to be wary of official figures there.

I suspect NI is lower than the rest of the UK because it has a younger population, so the numbers are not directly comparable if no effort is made to normalise for the number of people in high risk groups rather than just using the general population. The main thing to bear in mind with Sweden is that they were supposed to wind up with almost twenty times more deaths on their first wave than they actually did if the models that were circulating at the time had been accurate. Being on the same order of magnitude as EU countries that locked down harder calls into serious question whether the extra lockdown measures elsewhere made a significant difference and were worth the economic pain.

Not necessarily on the admin side of things.

Six weeks from now things could look very different on vaccine supply but Brexit will still be a disaster on trade.

Once the numbers on new cases peak and start dipping it's inherently because the virus is no longer finding enough new hosts to keep exponential growth going because herd immunity effects are kicking in. Lockdown measures suppress R0 so the more you lockdown the easier it will be for the virus to start spreading again when regulations are relaxed in the absence of a vaccine. There was always likely to be a "second wave" once pubs and schools were opened and people were flying to Shagaluf again in other words. Until healthy under 50s also get vaccinated there will still be plenty of scope for community spread once society normalises but the vast majority of it will be mild or asymptomatic and no cause for alarm. The politicians need to start explaining this and it is worrying that they are not. Zero COVID is a fantasy in Scotland in the short to medium term.