palmy_cammy

Yeah I noticed the extra pictures on the store. I've posted some of them in the kits thread. The away shorts look great as well, they remind me of this belter of a Scotland tracksuit.

First pictures of our new kits just released. http://www.qosfc.com/news-5230

First images of the new kit now on the OS http://www.qosfc.com/news-5230 The home top is fine pretty plain and simple but that's not a bad thing. It's very similar to the first Macron home top but without the striped collar. I like the look of the away top a lot.

Messi Scott is either Lewis Kidd or that absolute diddy of a goalkeeper we got on loan from Livingston whose name I’ve erased from my memory.

Well fingers crossed it works out for us, we've seen far too many duds between the sticks in recent times. I never expected us to get anyone of McCrorie's quality again this season so I had set my expectations very low and hoped that as long as they were better than Stewart it was something at least. It's strange because all common sense and logic would suggest that an experienced older player would be better suited to goalkeeper, but most of our success stories have been young rookies starting out in the game. Hopefully Ferguson is another to add to the list.

Seems to come with reasonably good pedigree. I’m not sure about his choice of squad number though.

The current board’s entire regime has been built on being financially astute so it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone it is the case this coming season when this is required more than ever. It’s possible to be aware of all that but still be frustrated by it and have the odd grumble though. Especially on the likes of here.

I suspect you are probably right but at the minute the squad is nowhere near complete never mind having the luxury of "backup". Also hyping it up on social media probably didn't help either. It may have been better at the end of the "meet the reserves" feature to have one on Gibson and mention then that he is going to be signing on as a player to provide cover and experience to our young squad. The way it has been reported makes it seem like he is going to be an integral part of the team. I don't think it is wrong for that to be setting off alarm bells if it proves to be the case. To end on a semi-positive, I'm delighted he is involved with the reserves again this year, and fully support the decision to run a reserve team. I just really hope his time on the pitch for the first team is limited as it will either suggest we've an injury crisis, or have signed a rancid threadbare squad. I wouldn't be surprised to see him stepping up to interim manager at some point as well when Johnston inevitably gets the boot.

Deary me.

The way I see it, in the cases of El Bakhtaoui and Holt both were offered "once in a lifetime" opportunities to move abroad and from the outside looking in we have stepped aside and allowed both to grab them. I would assume, particularly in the case of Holt as a local lad with a long standing relationship with the club, that in acting this way we increase our chances of the players returning to us in the future if the moves don't work out, or the players ever return to Scotland. Although allowing both to move on weakened/will weaken the team, I don't actually have too big a problem with it. Just because elite level football is a cynical, cut-throat business, driven by lawyers and mega-agents doesn't mean all levels have to be. The club are still an employer, employing human beings with families and personal ambitions. I'm proud to support a club that tries to look after it's employees even when it isn't necessarily in their best interests. I'm sure that may be viewed as "tinpot" to some, but so be it. The cases of Baird, Kerr and Harkins are a bit different. All three "spat the dummy" which in my view loses them any real right to special treatment by the club. In an ideal world they would be forced to stew over this decision and left out in the cold, but as 19QOS19 states, we simply can't afford to waste a wage like that. It's frustrating, but again I don't think the club had any other option really. Fortunately none of them particularly came back to haunt us in any future meetings. In fact quite the opposite in the case of Baird. He would try so hard to "get one over us" that he would without fail have a shocker every single time. His regular "heads gone" moments were a real highlight for a couple of seasons.

Well that is a huge blow. He didn’t get anywhere near the heights of his first spell but still managed to be one of our better performers last year.

https://www.skysports.com/watch/video/sports/football/12066188/dykes-gets-first-scotland-goal

Worth a try. At the end of the day, it’s a game of two halves. There are no easy games in this league, but football is a funny old game and we just need to take it one game at a time.

Not just any ‘keeper, but one with ties to Lee Robinson no less.

Obviously it would be nice if Shields and Goss were able to chip in with some goals, but for me the top priority for Johnston this season is to use a system that gets the best out of Dobbie. I mean it's just an absolute no-brainer that you would utilise your best asset and Dobbie is the best we've ever had. It was just awful watching him cut such a dejected figure for large parts of last season. As we all know the best way of achieving that is to partner him with hard working, willing runners who occupy defenders and make space for him. Gary Oliver was never going to be that player, but on paper Shields and Goss sound like they may. Whether it works out or not is highly debatable at this stage, but to me it is at least a positive that he appears to be signing the right sort of players.

Yes I know he is, I was commenting on the point raised that McCabe and McKee are very similar players. It was just a casual observation, I wasn't expecting so much backlash! Overall you have to say it's a good days work. Fitzpatrick would appear to be the pick of the bunch based on reputation. With Goss and Shields providing the intrigue as they are relatively unknown quantities. It would be great to see Goss follow in Lyndon's footsteps. Buchanan concerns me a bit. He's at the wrong end of his career and was surplus to requirements at perma-diddies Failkirk which isn't a glowing endorsement. On the plus side though, we could do with a commanding aerial presence at the back since Brownlie's departure. A lot will hinge on who we sign to partner him (as well as who we opt to play in goals) as I often feel the partnership can be better than the individual sum of it's parts. A lot of the things I've seen written about Buchanan would have been said about Brownlie in the past and he has been our best CB in recent times (that maybe says more about our other CBs than Brownlie himself!).

He absolutely flooded last season's squad with almost identical central midfielders and failed to sign any specialist wide men. Looks like we are following a similar pattern this year.

Unfortunately not. My eyes were in full working order during that period and witnessed our distinctly average league form and capitulation in all 3 cup competitions to lower league opposition. It was a complete disaster of a season, even through blue-tinted spectacles.

This is it in a nutshell. The grim reality is that lower Championship/Upper League 1 jobbers are the market we are dealing in. With some unproven youngsters snapped up on loan or plucked from obscurity making up the rest. The primary tasks for our manager are to find a system that gets the best out of these players, and try and improve them through coaching and giving them experience. I didn't see anything from Johnston last season to suggest he is capable of any of that.

I can vaguely recall getting really wound up by Buchanan during a game against Morton at Palmerston. I can't really remember the details, but I'm pretty sure it was along the lines that he was being very physical with our attackers, climbing all over them and swinging his arms about at set pieces etc. then up the other end when we were defending set pieces he was going down like a sack of tatties trying to win a penalty. For that reason alone I'm quite happy with the signing. We're long overdue signing a bit of a b*****d. We've had too many pea-hearted push overs in recent times.

I’d love to see Hamilton back this season to partner Dobbie. I think he showed a lot of potential and has a lot of similar attributes to Dykes. His workrate and fitness weren’t as good as Lyndon’s which is possibly why Johnston didn’t trust him to start games, but I think both would come with a run of games.

If, for arguments sake, the sell on is 10% then isn’t the £200k we would receive similar to the losses we posted in the last financial year? Presumably there is a strong possibility of losses in this years finances as well with the COVID situation, not to mention our piss poor league position and cup form last season. Obviously it’s good news, and the board deserve great credit for making the deal in the first place, but I think we are dreaming if we are expecting a spending spree off the back of it. This may not be a bad thing bearing in mind who's in charge of signing players at the moment. Ignoring the financial aspect, I’m absolutely delighted for Dykes himself. It’s a rarity to see former players moving in any sort of upward trajectory, never mind such a big jump in level in such a short space of time. It’s always interesting to see what happens when a young Scottish player (yes I know he’s Australian) moves down south, so it will be even more so with him being “one of our own”. There’s no reason why he can’t make a success of it. He’s certainly not short of confidence, and he appears to have a real drive and ambition to keep improving. His attitude with us was always spot on, so you can’t say he doesn’t deserve it.

The difference is that those who didn’t rate Dykes were wrong, but those who don’t rate Pybus are right.

That's a stinker of a group, I could easily see us finishing bottom.

I definitely hated Gretna, but I'm not convinced I hated them any more because I was a Queens fan and they were 20 miles down the road than I would have done if I was a Ross County fan from Dingwall. I know they were a genuine threat to Queens with their attempts to eat into our fanbase amongst other things, but I think my reasons for hating them were more general and would be shared by any sensible football-minded person in this country. Firstly Mileson himself was just a horrible sleazy individual that I doubt even his own family could warm to. Yet the media couldn't help but fawn over him and portrayed him as this zany renegade because he had a ponytail, smoked cigarettes and drank Lucozade. He was a twat. The whole "fairy-tale" nonsense really wound me up, there was nothing romantic about their bankrolled rise through the ranks and then highly predictable demise, if anything it was the exact opposite of a fairy-tale. No happy ending, just a list of creditors. As discussed, in the end they probably did more good than bad as far as Queens were concerned, but they made a complete mockery of Scottish football as a whole for a spell. It was a highly embarrassing chapter which I was glad to see come to an end. f**k Gretna.