harry94

Would I be wrong to say that they've always been quite firmly in support of an alternative system? Once they get to the position of power though, the parliamentary party has always shut it down quite quickly.

Got the fear with this tbh, it's been appalling this season when we've fielded these sorts of teams with one winger, team have looked really poorly drilled with the midfield bunched up in the same space. Hopefully a turning point today.

Lib Dem MP from Edinburgh on screen there. Her instincts are that the exit poll goes against local trends because the Lib Dems held the Shetland by-election in August on a significantly reduced majority. Brilliant straw clutching.

I think Alister Jack, YouGov didn't have him massively ahead. Mundell looked safe.

YouGov have 8% in it from their fancy poll, a bit down on what the last majority is. It's not insurmountable, there's always a few of that sort of lead that catch people by surprise on election night. In their data, only Mundell looks safe in the Tory holds, Jardine in Edinburgh West for the Lib Dems, whilst the SNP have around 24 that would look absolutely safe. It looks like Scotland will have a lot down to the wire, I wouldn't be confident about predicting it this year. There's 33 seats there that are being predicted to be close to the margin of error. Maybe it's just living in a safe consistency but a lot of the campaign up here has felt very tepid when we've got so many close seats. May had an initial working majority of 7 with the DUP in 2017 and there were shitloads of close parliamentary votes in the term, I think it should have been better shown up here that those few seats did make a difference in how parliament played out.

I've spoken to a few of that persuasion. To them, the ultimate evil is independence and Corbyn and even though they'll complain about Brexit and the Tory leadership, they are still quite comfortably going to get into line and vote for the Tories. Even if it was an Alabama scenario and their local candidate had done something horrific on that scale, I'd really not be surprised to see a lot of them hold firm. Interestingly, I've noticed as well that there's a certain demographic where the Tory leaflet slogans so impact very very effectively, much more so than anyone else, I've heard people use phrases like 'stick to the day job', 'obsessed with independence' etc in serious political discussion - in some ways, I think the Tory machine has been very very effective in how they've communicated to their target voters more so than other parties. The most baffling discussion I've ever had was with someone who wouldn't normally be considered a stupid person and telling me they were thinking about voting 'leave' in the referendum. They explained that they knew that it would be a complete shitfest and actually had a very good grip of what was going on but they felt that if we voted leave, it would be positive if Scotland had a largest leave vote to reduce the mandate of the Scottish parties fighting against Westminster. It's a bit of an echo chamber on here at times but I think it would be a mistake to think that there isn't a very formidable anti independence opposition that is more loyal than the yes camp in general. Turnout was around 72% in 2015 and went down around 5% in 2017, I would be very surprised if unionist or Tory voters accounted for a significant part of that drop.

Same pls

One of the most important goals of the last decade for Dundee was a Ben Gordon Alloa equaliser in the 94th minute. It meant Bomber gone and Hartley in to get us over the line, just. It is at the point today where if we get beat, I'll actually have a bit of optimism that things can turn good again as it'd surely mean change. I've got a wee feeling we're going to lose our heads today and take a thumping tbh.

How has Sam Fisher done for you guys? Noticed he was stretchered off for our reserves yesterday afternoon.

He's managed you guys for six years. In that time, you've consistently been projected to be in that bottom half budget wise, little better than Livi and Hamilton. He's consistently had to rebuild and has kept you afloat relatively comfortably. Having one year where his recruitment hasn't gone so well is always going to happen in that time frame and with those pressures, almost every year St Johnstone have looked doomed to outsiders and struggling to build a squad for the start of the season. Even if you guys were dead and buried (which you aren't, you're 3 points off 7th) and needed to throw the dice in panic to just try and escape through chaos, Wright as a free agent would undoubtedly be a great choice for any full time team outwith the bigger five or so in Scotland.

Meh it's grim. Under Hartley, he got a lot of credit from me because he was the first to get us over the line and had a really good first year (albeit league was a bit weakened). He had to go when he went and although McCann was a total stab in the dark, there was at least a little bit of substance with him seeming to genuinely have some intelligence behind him. Too many projects which were pointless without the core of the team - the likes of Elton, Nabi, Madianga etc were tremendous footballers and then Kallman was a unit for a 21 year old and the stattos loved him (and although he's not been prolific, he's doing well for a decent side in Denmark pushing for Europe). Although I deluded myself too long, I think it was reasonable for a while to put aside their setbacks and see some prospect of maybe picking up. McPake has done all his badges etc and I don't doubt at all that he's maybe done well in his roles but he's literally never actually held an official coaching role for a first team anywhere. The dressing room experience he has as a senior player is mostly here and we've not exactly been the best place to learn the last few years. I get that owners sometimes maybe have these personal relationships that they gamble on but when you see some of the stuff McPake has done in matches, he's absoloutely appalling at influencing games, there is a certain prerequisite knowledge that anyone in the game should have (i.e. Saturday, Finlay gets injured and he throws on Callum Moore when we're in a desperate situation, sitting beside him is one of his biggest signings from a top flight club in a similar role). Putting 'old heids™' next to him is positive but he's the guy making the decisions, if the world was as simple as that, we'd just promote Nicholl to manager and stroll the league. On the positive side, I think he has actually done not too bad in getting players who could in theory be made into an effective unit but I simply can't see any way that he can suddenly gather the ability to make them tick in the next few weeks. He should go away and get some coaching experience in a first team somewhere else and we should try and get someone in who could at least give us a glimmer of hope in competing for a play off. United were always vast vast favourites this season and it was unreasonable to expect a manager to win the division if they are projecting 80 points or so but there's still something to compete for this year and we can't afford to just write it off. Even if we didn't quite make it but finished the season well, that could be a great thing and give us a good canvass to add a little and resume as league favourites next term (presuming Hearts and Hibs are safe).

For what it's worth, they are going with the black attire on BBC Breakfast this morning.

I half think that they are doing this to take the piss out of us.

Whenever we've seen any sort of financial info about spending, Wenger was doing a great job keeping them ticking along in the top 4 for as long as he did. I think Arsenal and Man Utd (who didn't suffer from that resources problem) were so reliant on the managers they had that they've adapted appallingly ever since. When you see Leicester win the league, all the stars aligned for them but it wasn't a complete fluke, they have had a very robust transfer policy for years. Even this summer, they lost Maguire and had Soyuncu to step up from the bench. They seem to spend good money on these sorts of players around a year before their value goes mental.

That'd be a dreadful appointment! 33/1 though, same as Martinez. Rafa at 22/1 is surprising to me, would have thought it'd have been much shorter, there's a lot of talk about him on crazy money but I think he's the sort of guy that it wouldn't bother him much taking a pay cut - he can always go back to China or wherever for a big wedge if Arsenal didn't work out. I think if Arteta and Arsenal wanted each other, it'd be done. I couldn't see him bring bound to City in a way that he couldn't escape for an opportunity as big as that. Nuno has shades of Pochettino did when he was at Southampton with the success/failure in Europe. I think he'll be the guy but even then, I wouldn't be surprised if he turned them down. They are expecting top 4 finishes and their playing budget is probably a bit lower than that, seems to be asking for disappointment.

In fairness, he was dropped for a game at Aberdeen. There was maybe an indication there that the management wasn't too fussed about it. I'd have been begging him to stay, once January goes without him moving on, he's not going to spend 6 months with his feet up, he's looking at moving to a good side and he needs to demonstrate he can make an impact. The double fixture we had V Livi (where he was actually decent) and St Johnstone, he took a lot of stick for being effortless but the moment he left the park at half time in the second game, we went from actually being a bit competitive to a complete shitfest. I think him maybe a bit not arsed was still a really good player, a lot of the skill of a player like him isn't flying into tackles, it's having the composure to take a ball down and play it on to someone in space. The worst for me last season was Spence by miles tbh. He looked fine when we played a really structured team and he was a spare midfielder who was asked to do an extra bit of pressing and that had me quite hopeful. The moment he actually had any responsibility beyond that, it was terrifying and he just lacked the instinct, composure and physicality to have any sort of presence , there was a game against St Johnstone where he actually ended up off the pitch in tears. He's doing better than last seasons bunch at a top flight level but I'd be surprised if that keeps up. I liked Kharl, sense a bigger story there. Elton maybe would have been a nice project to loan out but we needed these guys to be playing instantly. I think one of McCann's most important players to him season one was O'Hara and losing him was actually a huge huge issue.

No bother, I picked you up wrong!

You do realise that the value of money changes as well?

On the Russia point, I think it's an oversimplification. He basically said we should go through the procedure and engage with the international framework, facilitating the legal requests made by Russia to analyse samples. It was nowhere near an extreme point of view IMO. If you have evidence someone has done something like that, you don't expedite the process and give them extra ammunition and accusations of the process being illegitimate etc. The Egypt comments were stupid though. I think that and the commenting on the Facebook photo of the guys mural with all the big noses, star of david and illuminati symbols are the examples that are genuinely quite bad. He did in fairness apologise for the second and maybe has some plausible deniability that he didn't quite grasp what he was engaging with but with all the sensitivities about the issue, it's hard to phantom how he felt it was appropriate at the time to go peddling theories like that.

Not really sure what the wingers could have done to avoid that game. Todd has been treated very harshly, he's a hard working player who plays to a system, decent defensively (as evidenced with his pressing V Aberdeen) and whilst he's not the most flashy player, he does provide some intent and width. If you're going to play without having a long-ball option to a striker, you need to be pretty good at playing from the back line. That's the way we play and in the first derby, it was a complete disaster as it relied on a very slow Ness to partner Byrne and play through the side, we were exposed badly. The second derby, the strategy was the same but it wasn't as bad as we had another body in the middle. Until we actually drill into the team that one of the strikers can be used as a direct outball (and no, I don't mean after five minutes of passing on the half way line and a paniced hoof to our forwards who has easily been marked out the game and has no space to attack into), we're going to be very predictable and have little margin for error in possession with most of it being in our own third. I think right now, we're pissing about with formations and although some things are marginally better (i.e. we improved with the introduction of second winger on Saturday but were by that point chasing the game), it's pretty much the same problems however we set up. The only exception to that is against Aberdeen where we acknowledged we couldn't play through them so allowed Johnson to play as a target man, we ended up creating more chances than most games this season and the entire midfield were brilliant in getting on top of the second ball. I'm not saying we need to go total hoofball and there are certain games where I think the football can be useful (i.e. Alloa and Arbroath who sit deep) but we're just set up so one dimensional right now. In fairness to someone like Mackie being shite and a liability on Saturday, I think if he was encouraged to hoof the thing when uncomfortable, he wouldn't have been such a worry. One weak link in this sort of style of play and we're vulnerable, sometimes it'll come together but teams in this league are smart enough to watch a few videos and press us high. IMO as good as a player as he is, we've signed Dorrans without really mastering the basics and knowing where he actually fits in best. It's pointless having that sort of talent at this level if they aren't getting to play in the last third and do the damage and right now, we're just throwing centre midfielders in to keep everyone happy.

For what it's worth, this was an issue Ed Miliband faced as well when he whipped for Palestinian statehood.

Que?

I've actually mixed it up a bit. It's from a Datapraxis poll published at the weekend. My confusion is that it's also of the pricey MRP variety and they used YouGov data to compile their prediction but the predictive work wasn't done by YouGov. As far as I can see, Datapraxis are a new business and not worked at previous elections. Last time round, we got a nice infographic and map on the YouGov website which gave us breakdown data for every seat in the country so I'd be looking out on their site.

She also had this in the last election as well. I think she's got a particular style of articulating herself and it doesn't quite fit with how Neil sets up, I think she will probably not be happy with herself but no one is perfect. I don't really think it's that good a style of interviewing as people think it is tbh. If you are bold enough to throw shite at the wall, Neil tries his contrarian thing at everything and will get sidetracked. The Boris interview will involve him not answering a single question but getting in the line about Corbyn and his two referendums a dozen times and that's all his team will really want.

Some of the expensive MRP data has leaked, full release on Wednesday at 10pm. It suggests Boris' seat is still in play and with some tactical voting, he could be gone. It also shows Dominic Raab, who currently has a majority of near 40% (which is insanely huge), struggling and getting by on a couple of percentage points. Also risks for IDS and a few of the notable 1922 members. Goldsmith well gone (although not entirely unexpected as really narrow majority) Take of that what you think but from those early reports, that's about 6 heavy hitters with really comfortable majorities in the south floundering a few weeks out whilst really big national leads are being reported. In the top 10 Tory target seats, there's 2 of them held by the SNP (Wishart and Crawley) and they look like they'll comfortably hold firm and the SNP will expand their leads there. 2 of them in the south held by Labour are showing that the Lib Dems may leapfrog into first place and it's not a sure thing. Maybe the full data will show an easy wipeout and Labour losing seats in the north but I think people talking about massive majorities should hold fire. FPTP leads to a lot of interesting fuckery and there seems to be realignments all over the shop.