Thumper

Wattoo's deputy rending his garments about how someone saying that people aren't true fans is perfectly normal pales in comparison to the second person (after a guy who registered yesterday) seriously repeating the SRE fantasy that Albinson is due to go to the third-best team in the country after having spent half the season throwing the ball into his own net. Having now tried to watch the second half of that press conference now that the wife and kid are in bed I'm even angrier that at some point the idiot in charge of the volumes decided that the problem was that McGinty's mic was set too high.

Blaming media students for this is unacceptable. I know a couple of folk who went through media studies at UWS and one of them is an industry-famous levels guy. You hand in something where there are three people talking and only one of them is vaguely audible and you get failed.

How have these fucking clowns not figured out how to have both question and answer audible simultaneously yet?

There is something quite funny about how the club has finally signed someone on the commercial side who actually knows how to run a Twitter account. Unfortunately that Twitter account is shared by a football team who would rather very much not mention anything about how they're doing this season.

Forrest was already a first team regular and one of the few obvious bright spots under Roberts. Let's leave aside that he had a fairly obvious inspiration in watching his brother playing in the Champions League as well. The others were definitely good signings, and it would be great to get that calibre of signing in again. But there's a difference between taking in unproven players from the level above and giving them some game time to show what they're capable of, and sending out your own players after they've already had a reasonable amount of time in the first team. If Bryden theoretically flourished at Clyde all it would prove is that he could cut it at Clyde's level.

For Ian McCall specifically, the very obvious answer is "if he got better, you wouldn't get him back afterwards". Also McCall's talent is _redeeming_ players as opposed to nurturing them. If he had a magical ability to get young players to be much better then he wouldn't keep bringing his favourites with him when they were well beyond their early days.

I don't imagine the club would be answering Uncle Ian's calls tbh, and they'd be justified. Also, and it has to be stressed here: "not good enough for the Championship" does not automatically mean "good enough for a league or two down". The last ten years alone have plenty of examples of players who left Ayr and could barely get a game in non-league.

Adeloye? Albinson? Holy f**k.

Why do people insist on taking things to obviously stupid extremes? This is obviously not true.

Which brings to mind the Jonathan Tiffoney saga, another case of an Ayr youth thinking he was fucking Pele and subsequently being proven not to.

Mark Shankland, there's a name from the past. He's only a wee bit older now than Moffat was when he signed.

"There is no way to predict anything" is a rational choice when picking lottery numbers. It is not when it comes to backing football managers.

Reid had lost the dressing room (rumours remain that this was Roberts's doing) and the manner of the capitulation at the end of his last season meant he was always likely to go (though IIRC I said I wanted to give him another year). His subsequent career has been typically Ayr-esque though (as in immediately vanishing into oblivion never to return). He was extremely tactically shallow and the club were never more than relegation fodder in the second tier. On the other hand, you never went into a cup tie with SPL opposition actually expecting to get beat, whereas with Bullen you never go into a cup tie with League Two opposition expecting to win. Why people are treating some random punter saying "three games" as if it's an official club communication is beyond me. Nothing of that sort has come out at all. His final home league game (an ultimately meaningless 3-2 win against Dundee featuring both the best and worst goals I've ever seen Ayr score) was one of my favourites, excepting all the giant killings.

Only villagers would pick the single least private-transport-accessible place in Ayr for this.

Just incredible that in 2001 Bobbys was host to one of *three heavy metal nights* in Ayr on a Thursday night. I basically DJed the Club De Mar Red Room one time by handing Big Wow a stack of burned industrial CDs.

Sorry but what the f**k?? Did the roof blow away or something?

Admittedly I've been in Ayr itself three times in the last calendar year and about ten in the last five, but I had no idea the Club De Mar had even changed names. Mind when Coolio played there and subsequently turned up at some hip-hop awards event in LA in the centenary shirt? Changed times. Falkirk are the absolute masters of failing to get out of League One. At least Ayr had the excuse of having no money. To be stuck there for 5+ years with home* gates of 4000 took special effort. Of course they finally figured out that all you have to do is put John McGlynn in charge and they just immediately hand you the L1 title. Fully expect that a relegation will be accompanied by the same sort of horrific management decisions that they've had. At least it is unlikely that Gary Holt will be installed as DOF and instantly put his own son on the playing books. * same postcode region at least. if you stand on a tall hill you can just about make it out

The thing is, the club has been pretty honest that the plan right now is basically to fix up the off-pitch stuff and tread water in the league. If Ayr survive this season then that keeps things basically right on track. Last season was completely unexpected and surely at this point even Bullen's kids can figure out he had nothing to do with it, The real panic mode will set in if the next three games aren't wins. At that point a failure to sack the manager would be an admission of defeat and an immediate pivot to figuring out how to get straight back out of League One with half a squad who would barely be comfortable at that level.

Three points from the last nine games. Another thing Bullen doesn't do as well as Brian Reid is completely implode.

Reid's 2011-12 team would almost all walk into the current XI.

Things really clicked when McGinty finally got dropped and the centre half pairing was Kirk and Musonda. I'd forgotten about Kirk tbh. Probably because my brain refuses to process the concept of Ayr not being absolutely horrific defensively.

Bangala's awe-inspiring performance against Dundee at Halloween was when the wheels came off. They'd been threatening to do so with less than convincing wins for a month before that. I really hope that if Albinson reads this he's as terminally online as most P&Bers and understands that this is just a rapidly-adopted joke. Actually no, I really hope that no Ayr players read this. That would not be good for morale.

In a just world, if someone says that if a game is a must-win, the interviewer should immediately ask what happens if the game is not won.

Said it would be like this during the summer. I do think the board is getting restless now that the club could in all practicality be bottom by the end of the month.

Back-to-back league games vs the bottom of the table, sandwiching a cup game to a lower-league team that Ayr have never played, is basically the crucible. At least four league points and a win in the cup is the absolute bare minimum required, and only three straight wins is really acceptable.