Thumper

On paper second is a hell of an accomplishment. However a look at the personnel and the season overall tells a quite different story. Ayr were top of the league in autumn but already opponents were starting to figure Bullen out despite Akinyemi being far and away the best player in the league. Ayr never retook top spot after Dundee won at Somerset on Halloween 2022 and it was only a last-ditch winner against ICT on the final day which moved Ayr out of fifth. Then an 8-0 shellacking in the playoffs. Throughout that entire time, people on here were correctly diagnosing what was going wrong. Meanwhile Bullen was talking about nothing except luck and character. When Akinyemi left, people yet again pointed out at length what was likely for Ayr the next season in the absence of another miracle unknown signing, which was a relegation battle. Bullen immediately fell into one and in the first half of this season did very little to suggest that he'd not just gotten lucky in 2023. Nobody seems to constantly demand that Arbroath fans justify Dick Campbell leaving given one freakish season.

It wasn't your pitch. If you don't engage in boisterous behaviour to celebrate an injury-time winner from two goals down you shouldn't even be there.

Smith making it explicit that it was Bullen's choice not to have an assistant as well.

Or a couple of thirty quid clip-on microphones.

I suppose I should say, for all the shit that the board gets, there isn't a club in Scottish football that has had so many pretty open and honest interviews with its senior board members in the last couple of years. You can see what the club means to Smith.

Aye but even when they did it from the same spot in Camerons for a few months you'd swear they were filming it on their phones from sixty paces. This is even worse when you have the media there and can see that e.g. the BBC can set up a pitchside interview with correct sound levels and balanced light in about thirty seconds, most of which is putting up the wee sponsors sheet as a backdrop.

Could the club please please please stop messing with the location and setup and just pick an interview spot that works and put the A/V in correctly? This one in particular comes across like a police interrogation, not helped by Smith sitting right there and Brown and Whittaker getting wee plastic cups of water. Oh and also that presumably someone forgot to put question marks on the laminated sheet full of questions, so the interviewer misses them out as well.

Like the big b*****d in The Mighty Ducks that they just bring on for fear-of-god slap shots that everyone jumps out of the way of.

"That's where Daddy's chair goes"

If you love him so much then why don't you marry him?

Two wins on the bounce and a 100% reduction in bald persons in all-weather fashion in the dugout. Ominous. On the other hand, the squad is still minging and it's a dice roll as to which if any of the forwards have laced their boots up properly. This could be anything. Let's call it QP 4 Ayr 5.

We need to workshop a snappier version of this for it to enter the public lexicon as BGM did. Night Sunglasses c**t, NSC?

Stream from the weekend is up. Ignore that it's spelled "Scottiswh Cup" and be sure to turn your speakers down to 25% before the commentators start.

Fairly sure that if he asked, it'd get fixed. Obviously the regime thinks this is absolutely killer bantz but an announcer who is roughly as popular as Scrappy-Doo is not going to survive that. On the other hand, McCall did repeatedly basically yell at Callum to tell him to ask normal, adult questions and stop wasting his time, and yet Callum's still in a job...

In fairness this is one of the things tourists will notice more. Certainly the only facts I could tell you about e.g. Girvan related to its puggies and its chippies.

Honestly cannot wait for one of the most decorated players in the last twenty years of Scottish football to be asked whether he ever went to Ayr Beach on holiday, and how he thinks the Ayrshire Derby compares to the Glasgow and Edinburgh ones.

What's the strategy for the almost unbearable interviews then?

The retired cop who lives across from my folks has a Celtic 9IAR flag on a fucking pole in the middle of his back garden. Might even tempt him along.

How is this episode 23 years old?

Accies stunk this place out to a greater degree than Arbroath have when they went down and didn't have three quarters of their squad injured either. Being good in League One means absolutely f**k all anyway when you get promoted.

One of the good things about changing manager is it gives everyone a shot at redemption. Conversely it also means that people who walk onto the team sheet every week should no longer be safe.

There should be a hat passed around for the away support.

The Davie White Technique of tranquilising the opposition in the first half and then putting them to the sword in the second works yet again.