blueheaven

This is the reputation Levein trades off, but based on what we've seen over the last year it's not the reality. I thought he'd steady the ship, get back to basics - all those comforting cliches, really. But the reality was his tactics and in-game decisions were incredibly naive and he was being out-thought by opposition managers pretty much every week. I think there's a very good reason why it's been such a long time since Levein made a success of being a manager.

I certainly wouldn't. I've never understood this attitude. There's nothing entertaining about losing. I couldn't care less about trying to implement some sort of pretty football. What I want is for us to get back to being successful. I want a manager who will sort out the defence, get us organised, play our best players in their best positions, get us showing some character on the pitch, and essentially make us difficult to beat again. Take us back to being a team who our opponents hate playing against. We need to be aggressive on the pitch, but disciplined too. All of that is what will give us the best possible chance of being successful. Not focussing on some philosophy of attractive football. We're way too much of a soft touch at the moment and fixing that should be a major priority. If we can get a manager in who can fix those basics, it'll give us a platform to start getting the other bits right so that we can climb our way back up the league. Getting relegated while scoring a couple of nice goals is not going to benefit anyone.

I'm not someone who generally claims to be in the know about things (in fact the opposite is more commonly the case) but this is one subject I do have a bit of knowledge on and I can assure you that the above comment is incorrect.

McQuillan was an athletic, overlapping right-back who got up and down the pitch all afternoon and had a brilliant football brain - if anything he'd have made an ideal wing-back and would have been far better in the position than many of the players we've attempted to crowbar into that position over the last few years. I still don't really understand why we keep insisting on playing wing-backs anyway. It very rarely works, and hasn't really worked for us since we lost Rooney on the right and the Booth/Tanser option on the left. I think some of the criticism of Brown is a bit harsh, BTW. He was basically a back-up player who was never going to be a first choice starter but did an OK job for us when asked to play in a number of positions outside his comfort zone (remember Davidson playing him at LWB?). Up until his last season when he seemed to just lose all confidence and completely fall apart, I thought he was generally alright. From what I've seen so far, he certainly contributed more than guys like Connor Smith or McPake have done or are ever likely to.

I've just tried Googling this and can't find anything about it, and have absolutely no memory of it. Can you explain what actually happened? There must be a link to a story somewhere if it was all over the papers?

Annoyingly, MacPherson's very presence is probably making it harder to sign that new midfielder. We should have been targeting an experienced central midfielder of exactly the type Levein is now describing as one of the summer's top priorities in the first place, instead of wasting the budget on players like MacPherson and then complaining that we can't get new players in until others leave.

Tell you what, though - you can really see from all this how the misinformation works from people like Yaxley-Lennon, Darren Grimes etc. Saints have said absolutely nothing about this situation one way or another, yet these guys are spinning it to make it look like the player is a victim and the club has somehow done something disgraceful. They don't even need to say anything outright. They just say enough to trigger their idiotic followers into leaping to the next conclusion and getting angry about it. I mean, we can see this happening in front of our own eyes, and yet there will still be people among the Saints support, FB Banter page etc who see this and continue to view these sorts of guys as heroic truth-tellers who are just saying the things everyone else secretly thinks and is scared to say. Just shows the power people like that have to influence the easily-influenced.

I think more of this sort of thing, and ideally as soon as possible, is a big part of the answer for Saints. They don't need to directly refer to the MacPherson stuff when doing it, and I think they'd be better not to. There are several places around Perthshire where refugees/asylum seekers are currently being housed, as well as organisations who are involved in helping them. I'd be in favour of seeing the club handing them free Ormond Stand tickets for the next home game. Not just as a good PR exercise for the club but because it would be a great way of helping to bring some of these people into the community and the club. Also helps keep the crowds beefed up so feels like a win-win. That all said, it's perhaps a good thing that we don't actually have another home game for about three weeks. BTW, not surprised at all to see that the worst of the comments about all this stuff seem to be on Facebook. The replies underneath the P.A.'s post about this are particularly vile. Truly nasty to think so many people with these hideous views are out there among us.

I agree, and should also have said that I wouldn't be picking him in the team either.

This is how I feel now too. There's nothing the club can say that won't be jumped on, so they should just say nothing. Regardless of what side you're on in all this, I reckon everyone can probably agree that this is a fight we don't want St Johnstone's name being dragged into. It'll blow over soon anyway. If Levein's asked about it this week he can just say he doesn't know (which, handily, is also entirely believable).

All I was told was they were having a Saints fans night at the pub on Sunday, and that there was a hope it could become a new tradition if it went well. Nothing about the documentary was mentioned to me. I'm assuming I was emailed about it because I'd got in touch with Adam Webb previously to send in some ideas after seeing the call-out on the club website.

I didn't go last night (it's not really my kind of thing) but I'm desperately trying to figure out what the actual complaint is here. We actually have someone running the club who is actively trying to do a PR push, get out there and meet the fans in person, respond personally to emails, galvanise the existing fans and maybe even grow the support. As a result of all this we're on course to absolutely smash the attendance we'd normally get for an opening game of the season. When was the last time Roddy, Stan, "Flax" (boke), the Browns or anyone else at the club actually made a serious effort to do any of the above? I'm pretty sure the answer is never. In any previous season we'd have been lucky to get 5,000 through the gate for this game, the only fan engagement we'd see would be a couple of tweets, and then Geoff would do an interview behind a paywall on the Courier a few weeks later where he'd moan about losing money and the fans not turning up.

Here we are in red socks. Would love to know what was behind the decision to wear those. https://bhfanzine.wordpress.com/1974-75/

There's a pic of the 1970/71 away kit here: https://bhfanzine.wordpress.com/1970-71/ I know that's not quite the right season but the 72/73 kit probably wasn't a million miles away from this one, with probably only the collar changing if anything.