Diamonds are Forever
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Posts posted by Diamonds are Forever
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35 minutes ago, DiegoDiego said:
Is there any data on this effect, either in Scottish football or in general? I'd be quite interested to see if it's a significant effect or if it's just conventional wisdom like "form goes out the window in a derby" which doesn't really hold much water.
Depends what bit you mean. It is undoubtedly true that teams rest players. I remember a while back quite literally playing an Under 19s team against St Johnstone before a play-off and we lost 4-0. But more recently, last year in the last game before the play-offs we rested 5 players, and most of the rest were subbed during the game. We still won, but that was against Edinburgh City who had began their decline and had nothing to play for. The year before in the last game against Peterhead we changed 10 players. We drew 1-1 at home and given the form we had been on (20 game unbeaten run) and how poor Peterhead were we'd have won that game with a full team. Neither game mattered for either team so made no difference in the end, but that's 2 managers, Murray and McCabe, who are probably going to be in these play-offs with a history of making huge changes.
If we have play-offs sealed by the last game there's no way we're playing our best 11 for the whole game. The only reason could be that we want to finish 3rd so if that's a possibility then we might, but I still don't think we would. Whether it would actually affect the scoreline is an unknown obviously, but it would make sense that it would given the size of our squad.
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A shame to see Gal move on but no doubt it's the best thing for all parties. Arbroath obviously releasing it to appease the fans a bit which is pretty desperate, but in reality I'm not bothered and think it will give fans a chance to show their appreciation and hopefully give him a boost to get another couple of goals before he leaves.
Along with Fordyce he's the most important player in the club's recent history. The 2 of them were central to turning the club from a useless League 1 side into a promotion chasing side and now Championship side. His first season with us we finished 3rd in the Covid season only 5 points off the top, then 2nd, 2nd, 3rd and reaching 3 play-off finals and ultimately promotion, and now 4th/5th in Championship. When you look where we were in the years before that it's night and day and he's a big part of that. He deserves huge thanks from Airdrie fans and delighted to see he'll be inducted into the Hall of Fame.
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4 hours ago, Diamonds Are Red said:
There's no getting away from the fact our turnover has increased dramatically this season as outlined (prize money for cup and league, crowds, hospitality, JD transfer etc...) - without trying to put a dampener on it was there something on here a while back about us having a £200k loss (might have misread it) and you wonder if PH or a.n. Other is due back on loans?
Seems to be running it sensibly, and no sign of concern from Rhys, but you just wonder how much of that increased turnover will be allocated to player budget and what (if any, could be £0 or very little) is set aside to cover previous losses?
Even apart from the money, which as you say could all disappear quite quickly, one thing that finishing 4th and the positive feeling around the club would hopefully mean is that we are a more attractive option for potential signings next season. At the start of the season there's no doubt that of the full-time teams we'd have been last in the pecking order for signings in the Championship. Mainly financially, but also players would have assumed we'd be down the bottom and not fancied it. Next season, even if our budget increases enough to be in the same ballpark as some of the other clubs hopefully the perception of the club is more positive than it was at the start of the season and we'll get good quality players. Particularly if you are a young player and see the opportunities they are getting, how much they are improving and the style of play that will hopefully help them develop.
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13 minutes ago, Hampden Diehard said:
That's ten times as positive as I could be after the last two games. Hope you're right.
Not that it's needed but an extra incentive to take points off Dunfermline next week (please!), it will make your last game against us much easier. Looking back to last season we rested half the team in our last league game before the play-offs, so would assume we'd do the same if it came to that.
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1 hour ago, 101 said:
Airdrie have done incredibly well to get to this position obviously with some serious rub of the green, they ought to have had Frizzel I think it was sent off against us in early March and then another shocker of a tackle went unpunished against Ayr and I think those two decisions combined with a relentless schedule of games would have seen the wheels fall off.
But their schedule has been hectic and with some key injuries they have kept on motoring up the league so fair play.
We were winning against Dunfermline at the time of Frizzell's tackle, even if they'd got a draw out of it we'd have seen it as a decent result. He then was subbed after 70 minutes in our next match (0-0 draw) after playing pretty poorly so there's no evidence him missing that through suspension would have made a material difference. Even more so McMaster, we were losing 2-1 at the time and lost 2-1, it would have had literally no impact on the Ayr game and his suspension would have been for the Arbroath match, which I'm confident enough to say we'd have won regardless, that scoreline hugely flattered them. They should both have been sent-off, but it's a hell of a stretch to claim either made much difference to those games or ones afterwards to the point the 'wheels fell off'. On the flip side I could point out a few decisions in those games that we didn't get like penalties, (non) offside goals and non red cards like Baird last week. As all fans could.
If you go through our recent wins you'd be hard pushed to find a team who had any complaints about us winning, and in a few cases the scoreline should have been higher. As you correctly say we've had a few injuries, lost our keeper for the season during this run-in, McStravick also seems to be out for the season after really coming onto a game, and McCabe has missed the last month, while dealing with a busy schedule. Certainly wouldn't say we've been unlucky with injuries compared to other sides (like Dunfermline, Arbroath or Morton early season) but we've not had a clear run either and dealt with it well so far.
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19 minutes ago, cb_diamond said:
Yeah, absolutely, plus hospitality is sold out every week this season, which will be another wee bump.
And gates from Hearts game which I reckon will be £50k+. And sale of JD to Palace.
The squad will obviously have had a pay rise from last year but from the signings you wouldn't imagine our wage bill went up by orders of magnitude, however our turnover clearly has. A huge summer for the club in terms of future planning as we are unlikely to ever have such a big profit from one season again. Do they use it for one big go at promotion on the basis it might be McCabe's last year and there won't be a Dundee Utd type in the league? Or do they 'stick to the plan' and try and build more foundations to become a sustainable Championship side longer term?
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13 hours ago, SandyCromarty said:
A good win for us and it puts the noise over Sheridan and Welsh to bed.
By 'noise' you mean someone asking a geniune question out of interest, that you seemed to get quite upset about?
In any event, it puts nothing to bed. Queens Park have pretty good fixtures. Both of you have Dunfermline away so that cancels itself out, but QP have Arbroath who are as close to a gimme as you can get just now, and they play us at home in the last game. Unless we lose the next 2 and Dunfermline win the next 2 we'll have a 2nd string side out resting players for the play-offs. That's a likely 6 points. Obviously you have the 2 point cushion plus the GD is like an extra point, but I reckon ICT will need another 2 wins to be safe which will be difficult.
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6 minutes ago, Diamond8 said:
Baird had one our players by the throat last Saturday, dirty fucker. Quitongo also a cheating p***k. Pleasing that this gang are losing.
Also stamped on O'Connor's foot/ankle out of sight of the referee, much like tonight.
They were all responses to totally innocuous incidents too, it's not like he's raging in response to being hacked down himself. A very strange guy.
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5 hours ago, Zanetti said:
The impressive thing about Morton's disciplinary record is that they've not had a single player sent off all season for getting a second yellow card. That to me suggests it's very much calculated, and they know when to turn it on or off as required. It's definitely part of the game plan and it clearly works for them.
Yeah that's the thing, and why the claim that they are treated more harshly by referees is nonsense. It would be quite the bizarre psychological phenomenon that meant referees treated them more harshly with yellow card offences but less harshly with red card offences. For the most part it's calculated - quite a physical style, try and get in front and then break up the game with fouls, a few of which get bookings. Having said that, in last week's game they did seem to lose the plot a bit, Baird in particular.
As mentioned by someone, I don't have any issue with it and wouldn't care at all if we were like that. It's been great watching us, for the most part, play quite attractive football the last 2 years. But there's also part of me that cringes a little at the constant chat of 'footballing philosophies' around our style of play. Can only speak for myself but if we'd had the same results in the last 2 years playing the way Morton do it wouldn't have made any difference to my enjoyment.
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This season it's a myth, everyone has now played the same number of home and away games and Dundee Utd, Raith, Dunfermline, Queens Park, Ayr and ICT have all picked up more points away than at home. And in total across the whole season more points have been picked up away from home than at home (12 points more).
It doesn't seem to be a majorly significant factor either way, but this season it will almost certainly end up that overall teams did better away from home.
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9 hours ago, A Diamond For Me said:
This should be a good game. Both teams have every reason to feel confident going into it - obviously it's advantage Airdrie for the playoffs, but both teams are in good form.
I keep expecting our fixture pileup to take its toll on us and it keeps on not happening, but at some point it surely must. We've been fortunate that McGill has become available again just as McStravick got injured - but we'll surely not see McStravick, Rae or Aiken again this season, and I don't know if or when McCabe will be back. Granted we've been doing pretty darn well without them, but those are all important players for us, and if we're not quite at the bare bones just yet, those are all players who you'd want available.
Airdrie fans can't *not* be looking for a win here with how we've been doing since the new year, but a draw would also be a good result in terms of keeping Dunfermline back.
That's why a win here would be so great. A draw would still put us in a good position, but a win virtually seals 4th which means we could rotate a bit in the final weeks and lighten the load on the key players. You don't want to lose momentum, but if we were to have any chance of getting through the play-offs we'd need to be pretty fresh going into them.
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1 hour ago, Dons_1988 said:
statement is good but I’d actually say it’s the wrong incident to call for VAR to be removed.
If you accept that technology has glitches like the Hawkeye system failing then you’d think it would be easy enough to have a strict protocol saying if the system isn’t working, don’t fucking guess and then lie about why you haven’t released the evidence of the decision. it isn’t something that actually requires the removal of VAR.
The removal of VAR is a broader point about the impact on the game and the problems of which it solves none of. That decision on Saturday at livi took a good 5 minutes after celebrating what seemed like a winning goal. And for what?
That's what I think. There's perfectly good reasons to remove VAR, but this isn't really one of them. It's just an example of poor procedure, if VAR technology isn't working then you just use the on field decision like we would if VAR didn't exist anyway, it couldn't be much simpler.
The statement from the SFA basically saying 'it was the correct decision so stop panicking' completely and utterly misses the point. No-one, apart from Aberdeen (and even they've been very reasonable in their statement), really care whether it was actually the right decision or not. People care that they've not followed any proper protocol and just overturned an onfield decision by guessing, coming out and saying that their guess was correct isn't really going to do much to reassure those fans.
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5 hours ago, Double Jack D said:
The fact we didn't press but there were still gaps makes me blame the players executing the plan. If and buts but we didn't start with a high press because we have done that before and you handed us our arse. We started with 2 holding midfielders in front of a flat back 4, that should tactically nullify the threat that your first 2 goals came from.
The argument you could make, with hindsight, is why didn't we start the game how we lined up second half. I couldn't blame Murray there to be honest as he was criticised following our game at Tannadice for having a powder puff midfield.
You didn't really press, but didn't sit off either and hold a shape. For the first goal Matthews is well ahead of the play running in circles in the midfield marking no-one, completely vacating a massive space. And Byrne (I think?) makes a half hearted attempt at pressing Frizzell but ends up just taking himself out the game. At the point where Frizzell skips by him there is a space about 50 yards wide and 30 yards deep in front of the Raith back 4 with not a single Raith player in it, all from 2 straight forward passes from Airdrie.
For the 2nd goal those same players are ahead of the ball again and have taken themselves completely out the game. For both those goals if you had a well organised side who held their shape out of possession neither of them happen. Equally so with a well drilled pressing side with a high line and everyone committing to the press. The halfway house that Raith did leaves massive gaps that good players will exploit. You can always isolate individuals to blame but to me there just seemed like an overall lack of idea over what they were meant to be doing, which surely falls on the manager.
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1 hour ago, Passionate said:
The McCabe debate, I actually think he is still one of the best midfielders in the league and also a very good sweeper, , can he play 36 games absolutely not, not for putting him out to pasture yet, not counting chickens just yet, if we get into the playoffs and the pressure cranks up , I would much prefer him on the park than off it...
Me neither, I'm not saying he should stop, but I wonder if he feels it's worth it to continue playing when he won't be as crucial to the team and obviously has other things to focus on.
It's clearly not been an issue him playing in the last 2 years so he may be happy to carry on as a squad player. I wouldn't be surprised if he stops though.
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1 hour ago, AJ77 said:
I think so, him and Fordyce are only turning 32 in the summer I'm not so sure they'll want to stop playing so soon think they'll feel they've got another couple of years left at championship level but money talks at the end of the day. Aberdeen looks an unlikely destination, possibly a move down south? I'm sure they'll be interest in them.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if he calls it a day this summer. Could be totally wrong but just got a feeling.
Either way if he was to get a great job opportunity I don't think there's any way he'd turn it down to have another year being a squad player in the Championship. If Aiken had been fit this year I'm not sure how much he'd have played. He clearly rates McMaster and if we could get another quality midfielder in next season then he may be happy to drop out. He still has quality on the ball but his legs are going a bit, he can sit in midfield but I don't see him able to do the high pressing game that ultimately he wants us to be playing. If we make the improvements to the squad that I'm sure he'll want to make then he'll not be much more than a back-up, which then begs the question why bother at all.
Fordyce on the other hand could definitely play another couple of years as a solid Championship centre-back. So he may be the one that makes it harder for Rhys to leave, assuming he wanted his own management team.
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3 minutes ago, Sub Parr said:
I think he’s been much improved the last month or so. Not sure if he’s playing a bit further forward?
Definitely looked better. I'm sure before the Dunfermline away game last month he had 0 goals and 1 assist in the league from about 25 matches, in the 6 matches since he's scored 2 and 3 assists. That's not counting the assist in the Challenge Cup Final.
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6 minutes ago, A Diamond For Me said:
Easton's barely kicked the ball against us this season. He was incredible with us - albeit against weaker defences - and seems to have done pretty well at Raith overall, but he just can't get past our defence at all this year.
Once he's in the penalty box he's impossible to play against, but outside of the box, and particularly outside of the final third, he can't do much. We've been so good at limiting supply to him in dangerous areas. When he gets frustrated he's his own worst enemy because he drops deep which makes him totally ineffective.
In comparison if you watch his goal against Ayr on Saturday Ayr just allow a simple pass into him on the edge of the box, gets 1 on 1 and pings it into the top corner.
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16 minutes ago, Black_and_White_Stripes said:
The play-offs obviously favour the form team. I wonder if Airdrie have peaked just a wee bit too early? It'd be good to have new blood in the Premiership.
I might be wrong but I'm sure since the turn of the year we have the best form in the league. I know that's essentially an arbitrary starting point but I'd say/hope 3 and a half months is more than a 'peak', it's not like we've just made a dip for the line at the end, we've been pretty good for a while.
That said, we aren't even assured of the play-offs yet by any means, and I think given our squad size and having to get through 3 ties, it would be highly unlikely. Quite happy to dream though...
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Brilliant result. I was totally wrong thinking we might focus more on Saturday, McCabe obviously knew he had Murray's number and fully commited to winning tonight. And huge credit to Frizz, I've been quite critical of his lack of end product this season but he stepped up tonight.
A win on Saturday should pretty much secure play-offs.
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2 hours ago, stevoraith said:
You see the “the standard of the league is really poor this year” line trotted out a lot and generally it’s nonsense.
I mean, how do you even begin to measure that. Folk will say it when one team runs away with the league and they’ll say it when it’s tight between all teams and the reality is that the quality of the league in general has no bearing on either of those outcomes.
I think this year has been pretty good quality-wise. Most of the teams could beat each other on their day. Even Arbroath rooted to the bottom are not an awful anti-football team like we’ve seen with some teams in recent years. Given the opportunity most of the teams will try to play decent football.
Which is a decent Segway into talking about Airdrie…..
Alan above mentioned that we’ve been poor against Airdrie in all the games so far and that is true but I think that’s on Airdrie more than it’s on us- Airdrie have not allowed us to play well, they’ve got their game plan spot-on to nullify us and play how they want to play.
If we want to win the league we’ll need to figure how how to stamp our authority on this game and dictate rather than be dictated to.
God knows how we do that but I’d suggest the two holding-midfielders formation from Saturday would be a good place to start.Definitely, you never hear the opposite that the league is 'very high quality this year'. I think because it's almost always used in a round about way to play down another team's achievements, or in the case of this thread a supporter's own teams achievement (if you can call it that yet). For the people saying it's a poor league, what would a high quality league look like? As you say whatever shape the league table starts to take people still say that's evidence that it's poor.
By definition if you are in a lower league then the quality isn't going to be the best in terms of pure skill level. I think entertainment wise it's the best league in the country, the vast majority of games are really well contested and the league table is so competitive. I'm not sure what else people want or expect from football at this level.
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18 hours ago, I Clavdivs said:
Academic now ,however,10 goals and 5 assists out of 24 starts says otherwise.
As mentioned he's only scored 4 goals in non-Airdrie matches. Of his 6 goals against us - 1 was a free-kick into literally an empty net, 1 was a tap-in to an empty net after us giving the ball away, another was a 1 on 1 after us giving the ball away, the one last Friday night again was a short header back to the goalie which he got to first. I think another was a free header from a corner which our goalie palmed into his own net. The one he scored early in the season was a nice strike and was the only one that wasn't at least in part due to horrific defending.
Obviously a goal is a goal, and you have to be there to score it and all strikers will benefit from mistakes, but I've never seen anything like it before where we seem to continue to gift sitters to one player. His goal record against everyone else suggests that it is much more a case of our terrible defending that has resulted in the goals rather than his good attacking.
That said, he doesn't seem the type of player who should be judged entirely on goals, as his assists numbers maybe shows. I'd have thought he was more a player who you use to hold the ball, win headers and disrupt defences to create space for better players around him. I don't think he's a bad player at all, but he certainly has our defence this year to thank for getting his numbers up.
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4 hours ago, TxRover said:
(All scores are IM’s team first)
3 X 0-1 and 1 X 1-1 in 23/24 (w/Raith)…that’s 0-1-3
3 X 0-1 in 19/20 (w/Airdrie)…that’s 0-0-3, running total 0-1-6
1 X 0-2, 1 X 0-1, and 1 X 1-1 in 18/19 (w/Airdrie, taking over in Oct)…that’s 0-1-2. Running total is confirmed as 0-2-8, but only seven of the eight losses were by 0-1, one was by 0-2.
What's so weird about our record against Raith this season was that until this season Raith were one of those sides I dreaded playing because I always felt/knew we'd fall to a rubbish 1 or 2 goal defeat.
But in fairness to Murray this pre-dated him by years. We hadn't beaten Raith in 11 matches prior to Murray joining us - losing 8 and drawing 3. So in that context you can't really blame Murray for our poor record against Raith, he just continued an already poor record.
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1 hour ago, cb_diamond said:
I predicted us as 9th this season in the predictions thread and was absolutely one of the people who was critical of the signing policy (many of whom I'll still maintain have been a waste of a wage Dunlop, GavGal etc). What I will say and have already eaten my humble pie on this is that my main moan was that there were players who we retained who I felt were nowhere near the standard. That's come to bear with ATS but I had earmarked Watson and Telfer as not good enough and I couldn't have been more wrong, particularly with Telfer, he's been absolutely sensational this season.
Agreed on ATS, but in hindsight it appears he was kept more along the same lines that Hutton was/is as a coach who could play if needed, although obviously not quite to that extreme. I think he's played 10 Championship games, and most of those were early season when we didn't have Megwa, meaning Watson was right back so we needed a centre-back. I'd be very surprised if he is still playing next season if he stays with us in his coaching role.
I always thought the squad lacked individual quality in forward areas, and still do to be honest. O'Connor isn't good enough, Toddy was hopeless the first half of the season (sounds like he was carrying injuries in fairness) but has come onto a game, Gal has struggled, so has McGill at times although I think is an asset when fit, McGregor I think has a role in the squad but isn't starter quality. Frizz has his moments but has been poor in a lot of games. It's purely down to good management that over the season we've gradually improved our goalscoring without actually signing anyone apart from Lyall. Around Christmas we were lowest scorers in the league but are now up to 6th. But I'd hope/expect that's where we make major improvements over the summer. If McCabe can get a tune out of the current attackers then with some real quality we could be a real threat next year. He has already shown last year that when he has good attacking players for the level he can get them to click.
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1 hour ago, HoBNob said:
They had came third in League One, only beat what was a poor Hamilton side in extra time and hadn't been in the Championship in about a decade, and didn't really strengthen in the window (Only brought in Todorov but lost Smith and another player to West Ham?) I don't think it was a massive surprise that most people had them bottom two.
I had them in 8th finishing above QP and Arbroath. However I didn't have them above an Ayr side who'd just finished 2nd in the Championship, an ICT side who I thought would benefit from the finances of a Scottish Cup final, and who had comfortably disposed of yourselves in the Semis. I didn't have them above a Morton who I think were the form side the second half of last season, and I of course didn't have them above ourselves, I didn't see what buisness they'd done that would make up the 20 point gap.
To me there's a massive amount of hindsight in play if you're suggesting that it's anything other than a surprise that Airdrie are currently in 4th, and it down plays what a fantastic job McCabe has done.
Definitely, and not least from Airdrie fans. I remember our thread back in June/July, fans having a near meltdown over lack of signings and fans being called 'happy clappers' because they refused to criticise the lack of signings by the club. Now there's a few pretending that all along they knew we'd be good...
I thought we'd just stay up, but it would be a real struggle. So have no issue with anyone else who thought we'd be bottom 2.
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Final positions, playoffs and such...
in Scottish Championship General Chatter
Posted · Edited by Diamonds are Forever
That's true, forgot about that. Explains why we only changed half the team. Plus Gal was going for top goalscorer so started. Safe to assume he'd have rested most of the team otherwise.