Francesc Fabregas

The 2005/06 season was sensational fun, despite the way in which it eventually disintegrated. I was 19, in my second year at university, I'd moved away from my parents for the first time and I was getting right into following Stenhousemuir; it was a real coming-of-age year, like The Catcher in the Rye or Stand by Me but with more lower-league Scottish football. We had some great players in our team that season - Willie McCulloch, Greig Denham, JP McBride, Paul McGrillen, Jim "Slime" Mercer, Colin Cramb, a 16-year-old David Templeton - and, before the spring, anyway, we played fantastic football. The 3-2 victories over East Stirlingshire in the Scottish Cup ("Ohya fucker, youse are out!") and East Fife in the league (where Templeton made his debut and turned a 2-0 loss into a tremendous win) will live long in the memory. We were even nine points clear at the start of March! The season also birthed the Akabusi Loyal; Des McKeown even chipped in so we could get a flag made. On the pitch, at least, things began to unravel over the final two months of the season and our loss in form, coupled with Cowdenbeath and Berwick Rangers motoring up the table, saw us fall into third. Stories emerged of dressing-room unrest and suddenly our little club's dirty laundry was being flaunted in the national press. I've only ever cried at the football once, and that was when Cowden smashed us at Ochilview at the beginning of April (I've always held a grudging respect for them after they won the championship season and that's why I'd like to see them overcome East Kilbride in the League 2 play-off). We finished that year with 73 points, our greatest ever total, and it still wasn't enough to win a league title. (If anyone cares enough, I did a big interview with McKeown about the season, which can be read HERE.) There have been some good days since - winning promotion to the Second Division in 2009, beating Kilmarnock in the League Cup - but the unabashed hard-luck story of 2005/06 probably won't be topped for a long, long time.

Christ. If that's the case, it's a fantastic way to kick things off as a League 2 club.

There's no official word on who's staying and who's leaving Ochilview just yet but I can't imagine Willis Furtado won't be hanging around next season. He deserves a move to full-time football and, if he stays in Scotland, I can see him going to a mid-card Championship team, someone like Dunfermline Athletic or Queen of the South. The player still has plenty to learn but there's a lot of talent in there and, with the right coaching in the right environment, I'm sure he can be a success.

Ah, come on, "Bring Your Own Socks"! The fabled GTF Day isn't for another month or so, so until then you'll have to make do and mend. Do not troll this thread. I want to keep this topic a troll-free zone.

You're absolutely right. Stenhousemuir were the worst team in the division this season and the league table proves it. We were especially poor against Stranraer, who seemed to have a real knack of bodying us over the course of the campaign; come to think of it, our 1-0 win in January seems pretty strange. I can, to an extent, see where beaver1 is coming from - as I said above, if we began the season with the squad that finished it then I believe we would have been safe, maybe even glancing towards the top four. But we didn't and our terrible start has weighed us down all year. There has never been a club who finished bottom of the division who didn't deserve it, no matter how may ifs and buts we wish to consider.

Well then. First of all, please forgive me for this self-indulgent post. I haven't fully come to terms with this afternoon's relegation, the first I've ever experienced, so I'm not sure what to make of it at all just yet. If nothing else, this may prove to be a cathartic experience for me, and probably me only. I have also updated the thread title accordingly and hope a moderator can move it when the appropriate time comes. After an up-and-down eight years in the third tier, we depart with our tails between our legs to the grimmer climes of League 2. This hasn't been a fantastic season - we were widely expected to be relegated at the start of the year and, despite the odd hopeful moment, none more so than the wins over Peterhead and Queen's Park in last fortnight, so it proved. You can handle getting bodied, that comes with supporting a small, unfashionable team, but it's the hope that kills you. While some Stenhousemuir supporters might be fairly indifferent to the club's plight and open to the challenges in League 2, I reckon it'll be a long time before we're back in this division. If we're ever to win a league title and experience any success then it's likely to be in the basement tier rather than here but I just don't think that will happen, not immediately anyway. I had intended to write a brief overview of our time in the division, from relegation favourites to sudden promotion hopefuls and back again (and there were a lot of enjoyable moments), but it's probably more important to examine how and why we're in this position than anything else. The decline set in the moment Scott Booth joined as manager. I imagine most Warriors would agree with me on this. Booth was seen as a forward-thinking appointment at the time and he did perform reasonably well to begin with after replacing Martyn Corrigan in February 2014, but his transfer dealings later that summer turned a decent squad requiring minor surgery into a bloodless, incoherent group of players. Booth inexplicably dismantled Corrigan's team, stripping out its experienced core and replacing it with callow youngsters and development loans. (It is perhaps worth remembering Booth favoured Robbie Duncan at right-back over Nicky Devlin, who he released. Whatever happened to Devlin? Indulge me, please.) The new manager overspent his budget (according to Colin McMenamin, the club paid around £3000 on a scoreboard, which was used once) on an inferior group of players that lacked character and staggered through a dismal campaign; I have no doubt Booth is the worst manager in Stenhousemuir's modern history and he achieved the remarkable feat of alienating his players, the supporters and, eventually, the board. When he was finally sacked in January 2015, the club also announced they were experiencing serious financial problems and would have to be propped up until the end of the season. This is, of curse, where the board must take their share of the blame for the current predicament - not only was Booth's appointment a failure but the then chairman Bill Darroch had completely taken his eye off the books, focusing more one his role with the SFA than his position at Stenhousemuir, and had failed to notice the trouble we were in. I have no idea how on earth this happened. Four or five years ago we were hailed as the model for part-time clubs with our synthetic surface and our focus on the community and youth teams. Now? A cautionary tale, perhaps. The spectre seems to linger over Ochilview to this day and lack of cash or resources or investment is an anxiety constantly gnawing away somewhere in the background. Brown Ferguson did well to keep Booth's side in League 1 in 2014/15 via the play-offs and, with his own group of players, he went one better the following season by finishing in eighth. If Ferguson had repeated the feat for a third time this year it might just have been the greatest achievement of any Stenhousemuir manager since Terry Christie's blockbuster team of the mid-90s, but it wasn't to be. The chronic lack of investment in the squad in the summer hamstrung us from the outset and although we were able to evetually bring in good, solid players as the season wore on - and enormous credit must go to the Supporters Trust for their cash injection - it wasn't enough when it came to the showdown, and the league table does not lie. If we had Willis Furtado, David Marsh, Oli Shaw, Connor Duthie, Mason Robertson and Graham Bowman in the team from the outset, I do not believe we would not have been relegated. While their effort and commitment has never been in question, the management and the players are also culpable for the predicament. Ferguson has a real blindspot for goalkeepers - Colin McCabe might go on to have a decent career but he let the team down with crucial errors time and again and should probably have been replaced a lot sooner than he was, just like Jamie Barclay last season. David Crawford was a minor upgrade but only till Bowman's arrival did we look competent in goal, and that was with about six or seven games of the season remaining! Ferguson's substitutions can also frustrate, with ineffective players allowed to continue on the field for too long and obvious changes ignored until too late. There is also a perception from some fans (not me, I must add) that the manager has his "favourites" and will field players regardless of form. Colin McMenamin is regularly cited, despite the fact he is still our best striker. The team themselves have only been hammered on several occasions, which was always going to be expected, and on the whole have competed well with their peers but they've been let down time and time again by silly individual errors. There are too many incidents over the course of the season to remember here but it is exasperating to have conceded so many goals from so many wacky mistakes. We lost 64 goals this term and I'd imagine over a third of them all came down to outrageous boobs. I am not looking forward to playing in League 2. While there will be some novelty in travelling to long-forgotten outposts, namely Montrose and Annan (should they remain in the league, of course) and visiting places like Ainslie Park to see Edinburgh City, I worry about who'll be turning out for Stenhousemuir next season. Ross Meechan is signed up but that's about it, unless someone can correct me. Our better players will go elsewhere and no doubt flourish - Alan Cook, Fraser Kerr, Willis Furtado and Mason Robertson could have their pick of the part-time teams - while Vinnie Berry is leaving for a job in America and Oli Shaw and Connor Duthie will return to their parent clubs. David Marsh might stay, so too might Graham Bowman and Ciaran Summers, and I'd like to think Kieran Millar hangs around because he would be a fantastic player at that level, but I don't know. Colin McMenamin might have an eye on his retirement, Mark Gilhaney doesn't look fit, Stephen Stirling seems to never be fit and the rest might not be good enough, even for League 2. The only saving grace of going straight down and not spending up to a fortnight contesting the play-offs is that Ferguson can plan immediately and shape his squad for next season. I don't know. I suppose it's days like this that make the successes all the better but Stenhousemuir never seem to have any success. Two promotions and a Challenge Cup isn't a lot to show for over 130 years of history. I look at other part-time teams with envy - Cowdenbeath are in a horrible mess just now but they've experienced more highs in the last decade than we ever have, we were once scrapping with Dumbarton in the old Third Division, and we more or less relegated Alloa Athletic in 2010/11. Where are our trophies, where are our days in the sun? A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with the guy I share the stadium announcer's duties with. He spoke about how his father, another Stenny fan, is in his 80s and his 70-odd years following the club have been largely dismal. You're 30, he told me, so realistically you've got about another 55 years of this. Jesus Christ.

Outwith The Road and No Country for Old Men, both of which I really enjoyed, I can't really get into his stuff. I read the Border Trilogy and other than All The Pretty Horses, most of it was a struggle to get through. I needed quite a lot of stamina to get through The Crossing and couldn't get into Cities of the Plain and gave up on it. I also patched Outer Dark after a couple of chapters. I'm reading Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger just now. This is the first work of Salinger's I've read since The Catcher in the Rye and I'm taken aback by how good a writer he is. He really has a brilliant ear for speech and recreating the middle-class ennui of his characters. Very enjoyable so far.

I bought this game the other night and while it's good fun, I'm not sure how much skill is involved - any decent play I've been involved in has come down to luck. What can I do to get good at it?

We'll have to agree to disagree! Life's too short to argue about who likes things the most on the internet!

No Country for Old Men is one of the rare instances where the movie is better than the book. The Road, however, is absolutely untouchable and one of the best novels I've ever read. Harrowing and thoroughly upsetting with only the tiniest slivers of light at its conclusion.

I've just ordered a wireless PS4 headset so I look forward to talking to you in the near future and planning heists! Leeroy Jenkins!

I saw this going for £25 in Asda last week and picked it up. It looks glorious on the PS4. I've started playing in online; it's astonishing fun. I've spent most of the time taking part in stunt races to make a little bit of money before I get into the missions. Please add me online and let's form a gang.

1982, Janine isn't all that great. It shares similarities with Lanark in its descriptions of a young man's journey into adulthood but it isn't anywhere near as interesting. The pornographic scenes might be the best moments but even then, it's a bit tedious. I don't think I could really recommend it.

Can't believe some of the marks on here offering up Big Sam, Galactic Kevin Keegan, USA Soccer Guy and Angry Salmond as worthwhile Twitter accounts to follow. Parody accounts by their very nature are garbage and shame on anyone recommending them with a straight face. As for The National, I think it was columnist Matthew Fitt who dragged the organ into new, uncharted depths - CLICK.

Savo! That's the boy. No idea where I got "Gazzo" from. Aye, Savo. An absolute candy-ass, one of the top 10 candy-asses to have appeared on this website.

Sorry to bump up a thread after it's outlived its usefulness but does anyone remember "Saint Gareth" or "Gazzo", as I think he later became known? He was frightening or anything, far from it, but he really was a goddamn candy-ass. A limp, fetid poster under the "Saint Gareth" moniker, he was so candy he could give off type-2 diabetes. I seem to remember him chasing after SaintSam (hey, didn't we all!) and running a terrible football forum called Sliding Tackle, offering beige opinions on the latest topics. Then, out of nowhere, he transformed into a terrible WUM called "Gazzo" and spent his time getting under the skin of the forum's thicker residents. I don't know what happened to him but he was an idiot.

The Phoenix is now the chairman at Stirling Albion and probably doesn't have the time to deal with the day-to-day fiddle-faddle of Pie and Bovril any more. He was a very decent man offline but, like so many others who participate in puns and an overuse of the emoji, a bit tiresome on these boards. I've been thinking about Kilt quite a lot over the last few days and I can't shake the image of him playing as a goalkeeper at the Fives tournament in 2007 with shattered spectacles.

All the more embarrassing was the fact he'd taken this "Vectron" persona from a horrendous Mitchell and Webb sketch: Other than the infamous cocktease post (remember when the late "Dubs" used to reply to all his posts with it?!) I can't remember "xbl" being a particularly creepy person. I think I might have met him once at Ochilview, he looked like Stig of the Dump with hearing aids, but he seemed alright. He was a dreary poster though, as evidenced by his "Vectron" and "Grey Ghost" phases, and was guilty of stinking up the whole forum.

Books, on the whole, are really good and I've started to get back into them since the turn of the year. I finished James Joyce's Ulysses earlier in the week - it's the third time I've read it and I don't think I ever appreciated what a totemic work it really is. Absolutely astonishing. There are some parts that don't work all that well and require a lot of stamina to get through them but it's mostly wonderful. I've moved on to 1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray. I'm not sure what to make of it so far. It's certainly not as captivating as Lanark, that's for sure. It's a bit like following up the best meal of your life with some runny Vienetta.

I've been following @LowQualityRegen for a few years now and he's consistently one of the best on Twitter. The recent thread where he played Football Manager 17 as the tempestuous Cowabunga Baby was outstanding - CLICK.

Ron Burgundy was exceptional during his short run. He took on all comers and I remember xbl getting a particularly hard time of it. I'm sure it was "Reina", a teacher, whose employers he called to complain about her internet use during school time. It was that moment where he tipped from a good laugh into something really frightening. Still, the time he bodied Kilt was one of my all-time favourite moments, and "Ronkers", his one-word thread that was deleted within minutes, was tremendous.

Yes mate, I'd agree that 2007 really was the halcyon days on this forum. Rich, well-drawn, larger-than-life characters, meaningful beefs, and romance, intrigue and mystery at every turn. I really wish I had spent more time studying than on the library computers refreshing the General Nonsense forum. This was the place to be for breaking news; I think Facebook and Twitter has lessened this site's impact. The social side was tremendous too - playing in the Select side was great fun and I got to hang out with some smashing brers, while my team, Ooh Gengy Loves You!, won the annual Fives tournament that year. The Select boys should get together again in the summer to celebrate the 10th anniversary. The big team night out in Clarkston was brilliant - big SLJ bounding up to get his award to the theme from Black Beauty.

Yes lads, I've just had a look through my old laptop (I use it exclusively for playing a Football Manager 2010 save game with Arsenal (currently in the year 2093) and watching videos) and I've found it. It was first posted in June 2009 and, reading it back, this was surely a knotty period for even someone with Kilt's lifestyle: Nick (White Witch = Good Guy)

I remember something like Kilt boasting about his role in assisting the emergency services during the Glasgow Airport terrorist attack before it transpired he was actually in a pub down the road. "Ron Burgundy" tore into him and absolutely bodied him in one of the reddest, angriest beatdowns, calling him a "tartan shambles of a father".

"Hugs and chills"