capt_oats

It's beautiful. Yer man is so utterly bent out of shape..."If Declan Gallagher gets done by one of Celtic's new signings from the J-League or gets done by somebody like Morelos fine. Declan Gallagher shouldn't be getting done by a guy that came in from Christ! what was it? Rotherham reserves or something like that? It's shambolic." Scunthorpe chief. It was Scunthorpe United...in League 2. Like they weren't absolutely ragdolled on the regular by a boy that we signed from Wrexham in the National League.

As someone who is a massive fan of schadenfreude, let me tell you, the section of this pod around 13 mins where the boys talking can't even mention KVV's name is absolutely delicious. "Bullied by one of the more limited players in the SPFL, his record against teams other than Aberdeen really just underlines that." "The truth is pretty much against everybody else he's been absolutely shite." Oh my...the absolute disrespect.

This is actually something that's probably worth flagging amongst the noise following losing to United last week. We're at the stage of the season where there's probably enough of a sample size to draw some conclusions. (TL,DR: we're shite away from home). In terms of our home record the only teams we've lost to (in all competitions) have been Hibs on the opening day, Rangers and Celtic (x2). P 17 W 11 D 2 L 4 GF 26 GA 23 GD +3 That's good form in anyone's book (and the scuddings we've taken off Rangers and Celtic skew the GA column a fair bit). The flip is our away form where we've only won three times in 16 games. P 16 W 3 D 4 L 8 GF 11 GA 23 GD -12 Having a quick look at some of the posts I missed last week in the aftermath of the United game @MP_MFC made the point that there's not much difference between the run of poor form through the first round of fixtures and what we've seen recently - that seems fair comment IMO. The games we lost in the first round of fixtures were: Hibs (h), Hearts (a), Celtic (h), United (a)...so, 3 of the 3 games we've lost in this round so far. It's also feels less of a coincidence that of our last 6 without a win in the league 4 have been away fixtures (and we only lost 1 of the 2 at home and that loss was against Celtic). The question I guess is how we fix that as the home form pretty much nixes the argument from the "we're shite, we'll never win another game" Twitter crowd.

Clocked that he'd disappeared from the First Team staff page last month but I see that's Andy Boles moved to a Sports Scientist role at Celtic B (going by this Twitter bio). We were advertising a S&C coach role back in December. It's pretty wild the difference we've seen on that side of things since the department was set up.

He's definitely on. My hot take is there are shades of Ojamaa with his general style.

Ogren's £2m sale a season seems optimistic but on reflection, as Burrows pointed out to one of his reply guys (though tbf I'm assuming *checks notes* ******Gambino isn't a Motherwell fan) we've averaged out £1m of transfer revenue a season for the past 5 years. So given United's level of investment hitting some sort of average transfer revenue around that figure maybe isn't as wild as it seems. As @YassinMoutaouakil touches on it's a broader discussion but there definitely seems to be a growing market for trading the youth players the problem I guess is how you actually get the value there with the English academies targeting them before they've even kicked a ball for our first team. We've already seen it with McKinstry to Leeds and McAlear to Norwich while there was chat a while back about Sam Campbell being of interest to Liverpool and Leeds (in fact the story was we'd actually accepted offers) then more recently there was Man City being linked with Bailey Rice. That really starts to take us into the more existential "what's the point of academies if they barely see the first team?" question. Speaking of former academy players...he's at it again.

As an aside, turns out there were apparently clubs in for O'Hara through January. Also big Grezza is saying it's his fault we got scudded on Sunday.

As you say, if they want to go full K Foundation then absolutely fair play to them but it's a pretty clear answer to the "sUreLy uNiTed dOn'T pAy mUcH MoRe ThAn uS?!?!" crowd who were bumping their gums about Watt moving... In a normal season (when we don't have half our squad out with injuries) our entire wage bill for the club was £3.7m. From the looks of things United's comparable wages are hitting £5m.

Granted they were in the lower leagues the seasons prior but it's not a one off either. Our wage:turnover ratio was 130% at the time of administration right?

Mentioned it in our thread the other day when I'd clocked folk on Steelmen Online seemingly being genuine in suggesting we have a look at him but there's heavy shades of Ross McCormack pitching up at Fir Park a couple of years ago with Griffiths' stint with you guys. McCormack only managed 4 brief appearances before he disappeared with a "calf injury" but it was genuinely disappointing the way it panned out, especially as we ended up being a lot of fun for the rest of that season. If he'd got it together it'd have been a good laugh.

Off the back of the Celtic fans falling over themselves on Twitter to offer advice on our finances I had a quick look at the numbers since we became fan owned in 2016...with 17/18 being our first full season of fan ownership: 16/17 - (£181,844) 17/18 - £1.72m 18/19 - (£435,970) 19/20 - £346,590 20/21 - £3.57m Oh...

I've no idea if this is the case or not but it's felt to me like it's been a mix of giving Ojala proper recovery time and being fair to Carroll, who'd been out the picture since August after his sending off and had by and large done alright until yesterday. I think @eliphas makes a good point in saying that this season feels like it's a learning curve for Alexander in terms of the players he's signed/inherited, their mentality and the like. Even the change in shape feels like it's been an experiment of sorts.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/35592307

Is WGS involved in making the appointment? If so, you know who it'll be...

We seemed to go wildly off the rails at Fir Park around the point Robinson decided to start "trying to play football" and it's really just been a continuation since then. It's been mentioned before but Robinson was unbeaten (without actually winning) against Rodgers at FP - 1-1, 0-0 and 1-1 (with a 2-2 against Rangers in 17/18 as well). Even the 3-3 against Rangers at FP was still a 'Thunderdome' era result. The 0-3 against them at FP later that season was when we'd switched to 433. Since 19/20 the results at FP have been: Robinson: 10/08/19: 2-5 - Celtic 15/12/19: 0-2 - Rangers 05/02/20: 0-4 - Celtic 27/09/20: 1-5 - Rangers 08/11/20: 1-4 Celtic Alexander: 17/01/21: 1-1 Rangers 16/10/21: 0-2 Celtic 31/10/21: 1-6 Rangers 06/02/22 - 0-4 Celtic *sigh*

Might be. It'd make sense I suppose but doesn't change my they can get to f**k position. In fact it only strengthens it.

He managed a point at Ibrox earlier in the season anaw.

Rarely listen to Sportsound but caught a bit in the car there. Who's the absolute mile-oot that's on first name terms with every *** player? Alfredo this, Scotty that, Ryan the next. Whoever it is can get themselves to absolute f**k.

7 points. Agree it's short but I guess the teams below us will be slitting each others throats. They can't all win all their games. I've already mentioned our home form and if you look at our remaining home fixtures in this round (after today) it's all the teams below us. 19/02 - Aberdeen 02/03 - County 05/03 - Dundee 02/04 - St Mirren I've no idea of the probabilities of the league at the moment but looking at previous seasons 7th place at the split has been (so above this number for 6th): 20/21 - 40 pts 19/20 - n/a - league curtailed after 30 games 18/19 - 44 pts 17/18 - 38 pts 16/17 - 35 pts 15/16 - 41 pts 14/15 - 43 pts 13/14 - 34 pts 12/13 - 42 pts 11/12 - 37 pts 10/11 - 38 pts That gives you an average of 39.2 as a points total to finish above (based on the last 10 seasons we've got to the split) - we're currently on 33 points.

I mean, I get the anxiety but it's probably worth mentioning that we're unbeaten in our last 6 at home (only lost 1 in the last 8 - against Rangers) and have the 4th best home record in the league. We'll take our pumping tomorrow and still be 4th but really what matters is how we do in the remaining games against the teams below us - especially at home. The only teams below us who have beaten us have been Hibs, United, Dundee and County. 3 of those 4 were away from home and the Hibs one was the opening day of the season.

Aye. Craigan did an interview when he left our u20s job and discussed the Reserve league a bit. He highlighted that when they went ahead with the "re-brand" there was a lack of consultation with the coaches involved etc, they just went ahead and did it. The upshot was a lot of mismatches in games (that said, in the Dev league we beat your lot 9-1 so that's a bit rich to an extent) and he talks about a lack of competitive edge - one week we're getting beat 6-2, another week we were winning 6-1. I mean, you can think what you like about Craigan but all that is fair comment IMO. It was a situation where no one was benefitting.

The attempted pivot to the "Reserve" league was an absolute fucking disaster. It seemed to be driven by the rose-tinted "back in my day" crowd. There's a deep irony that we've probably seen more players break into first teams than ever who came through the academy/dev league system yet it was viewed by "ex-players" as unfit for purpose. I mean, we've just announced a record profit largely off the back of selling a player who went straight from Dev league football into our first team and subsequently went on to be Celtic's YPoTY and PoTY. Either way though we're seeing the extent to which not having either a development or reserve league is absolutely fucking things so something needs sorted out.

Big Mich'el continues his footballing travels at Linfield.