cmontheloknow

There seems to be a few major stumbling blocks for summer football. I don't move my lawn between October and March because the grass doesn't grow. Pitches need work on them and need to be re-seeded. A full-time team can buy in a new surface - I would imagine that's beyond the bank balance of most councils and Junior clubs beyond seeing to the goalmouths. Parks being played on through the summer will not be able to recover. Councils love to shut their parks too... The 'predictable wet weather' season doesn't exist here - games can be off at any time - there have been August wipeouts in the past. Without floodlights, any rearranged games cannot be played midweek in March and mid September onwards, which leaves mid April to late August as the window for them. Clubs will be faced with fielding weakened teams in school holidays - currently it only affects the very start of the season and there are usually a host of trialists to pad line-ups out for the waste of time Sectional etc, not sure how much more of an impact it has in East league games. In a summer season, those missing players would be missing key games midway through the season - perhaps a big Junior Cup tie - or do we bar big cup ties from the holiday season...?! We're looking for 30 league matchdays in East and West for next season. A season starting 1st saturday in March has 35 saturdays until the end of October. But what about cup ties? You're probably wanting to have the Junior Cup at weekends, so lets take 6 of those. Immediately, without postponements you're needing midweek dates to fit the fixtures in and that's without any other knock out cups considered. If the season is shortened from the present June-??? (I guess when fixtures stop, wages stop, where possible) to March-Nov, are player contracts also altered so as to reduce requirements to pay them?

Do the SJFA not still pay the BBC to cover the cup final? Can't see run of the mill games being worth the cash.

We've been trying to get him for longer than that. It's not as if he's only now come up for selection. He declined selection for Malky's game and has also previously said NAW to the 21s.

An out of date list too, a few of those sides have gone the way of the dodo. One of the major things that separates Junior from Amateur is longevity. While there are a number of amateur clubs who have been around for years and years, there are also a significant proportion of fly-by-night ventures, akin to the doomed Falkirk Juniors project where mates wanted to play together and as soon as that ended, the club went too. At this level, the club needs to be more than just the playing squad.

Sky Sports News' team news ticker yesterday had Aberdeen's Stevie May set for his debut against Hibs.

A former Junior centre forward I'll have you know though, as someone rather unkindly put it within earshot of me, 6-04 but jumped 5-08. I have a selection of his clubs being Motherwell, Cumbernauld Utd, Stranraer, Dumbarton, Clydebank, Pollok (4 goals from 22 apps), Queen's Park and Neilston.

I believe they are able to pull decent numbers from surrounding towns like Catrine, Mauchline etc, not just Auchinleck. It's a very hard stat to prove either way, but some clubs have a pull from way beyond their own boundary.

Really? I'd say they were pretty similar to a number of Junior / senior non-league towns. What I would say though is that a club can realistically hope to get no more than 10% of its population along to games - anything in excess of that and they're doing very well. Just taking the current top 50... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_in_Scotland_by_population In the top division, you get: Aberdeen 8% (much bigger catchment than the city) Celtic 9% (catchment well beyond city though) Dundee 4% (two club city) Hamilton 5% (too close to Glasgow) Hearts 4% (two big club city) Hibs 4% (two big club city) Kilmarnock 12% (figure boosted by OF attendances doubling average) Motherwell 17% (some big travelling supports - also have to factor in M'well attract support from joined-on Wishaw, Craigneuk etc which drops it below 10%) Partick Thistle <1% (OF) Rangers 8% (catchment well beyond Glasgow) Ross County 85% (catchment across the North) St. Johnstone 9% Only a few get above 10% and that is with either a much larger catchment area than their town (OF / Ross Co) or they benefit from large gates from the clubs with fans who will travel. Average excluding Ross County is 7%. Brechin 11% (huge crowd vs Dundee Utd, big crowd v Dunfermline) Dumbarton 5% Dundee Utd 4% (two club city) Dunfermline 11% Falkirk 13% Inverness CT 5% Livingston 2% Morton 5% QOS 4% St. Mirren 6% Average for Championship is 7% Airdrie 2% Albion Rovers 1% Alloa 3% Arbroath 3% Ayr 3% East Fife 7% Forfar 5% Queen's Park 0.1% Raith Rovers 4% Stranraer 5% L1 average (QP excluded) is 4% Annan 4% Berwick 4% Clyde 1% Cowdenbeath 3% Edinburgh City 0.07% Elgin 3% Montrose 4% Peterhead 3% Stenhousemuir 2% (of Larbert and Stenhousemuir) Stirling 2% L2 average (Ed City excluded) 2% So what do these figures show, if anything? The % of population attending goes up the higher the league. A more accurate way to do it would be to completely exclude outliers (ie Dundee Utd giving Brechin home 5 gates in one) but that's for someone else to do! Realistically, part-time national clubs can expect to get no more than 4% of their population to attend. I have a LL attendance for comparision, Dalbeattie 3%.

https://spfl.co.uk/league-two/fixture/3639874/ The attendance figure has been there since yesterday morning at latest (as I looked at the link then) so no idea where you went looking for it?

Everything south of Brechin and Montrose would be LL - them included, even Oban on west coast. Centres of population above the line are Fort William and Stonehaven.

Rogers is going to be 24 in a few months time. At this stage, with three full seasons of Championship football under his belt, has he proved to be good enough to play as first choice for the 2nd/3rd best side in the country? Or put it another way - if Joe Lewis had signed for someone else this window, would DM have wanted to go on for here on with Danny as 1st choice? I'm sure the coaching team know what they're doing and if Woodman, exactly three years younger, comes in as 1st choice, it's because they don't see Danny as any other than back-up at this level. Back-up is benchwarming, coming on as a sub and filling in. It's such an important position you cannot bugger about and I suppose there's always the worst-case scenario of DR getting injured and having to rely on the U20 kids. If Woodman is better than Rogers, then sentimentality doesn't come into it. That's football - there's always someone else coming along who wants your place. The recent BT doc on youth development had a great clip with Joey Barton (fud yeah but once a blue moon talks some sense) who talked of going to speka to the QPR youth team and basically said to them "which of you are going to take my jersey off me?"

after the appeal is dismissed, otherwise not at all!

Devlin was with the Dons for a few seasons when still at school but moved onto Celtic before signing with Accies.

It's a funny old place, the rural far west coast. One team in the pyramid (the Fort), a handful of others (Tarbert, Campbeltown Pupils, Lochgilphead Red Star, Oban Saints, South Lochaber Thistle) playing amateur in the Glasgow area and anything beyond that is the summer leagues. The SPFL's own cut-off for the Highland/Lowland split would see Fort where they are, just. I would guess the main issue they'd have playing in a West set-up would be quality player recruitment - a fair number of Inverness-based players might be deterred. Then again, they might be able to recruit more from Argyll than they presently do if the travel times were more agreeable. Some really decent players in this area.

It's called 'making a statement.' They're good at that.

To be fair his reason for wanting to leave was that he couldn't get into the U20s...

The point being made re: Stranraer and Annan is a good one. There is no comparison between them having B teams in the SoS and the OF trying to shove their Colts into L2. Annan as far as I know are basically using local teenagers for their B team. Stranraer run 3 teams: 1st team, U20 which pulls in decent players from the more populated West of Scotland (and contains the guys likely to chap on 1st team door) and their B team is AFAIK a means of giving (mainly younger) local guys a game in the blue and white, with some experienced players around and about. The only way these sides would compare to the OF's idea is if the OF only used L2 quality players and were giving them the chance to live the dream, i.e. what Sevco should have done when dumped down there in the first place. More widely, looking at the Elgin document it would seem that the sole purpose of this is to get the 60% or so of players who don't progress from U19 to U21 international football playing - it brazenly states that the best youngsters are in OF squads but are not being played and therefore are lost to international football. This week Aberdeen released a 17 yr old named named Lewis Hutchison who was an U17 Scotland cap. He has now signed up with a Junior team in Aberdeen and has turned his back on the full-time game (for now). 10 months ago he was regarded as being part of the elite at that age category and now finds himself in the middle division of Junior football's weakest region (admittedly with a good side). Could it be that the way players are scouted at ages 15-20 is pretty hopeless?

I'd replace 'some' with 'all'. You could make an argument for the Shire I suppose but they seem to have lost their identity since selling Firs Park and becoming a tenant at Ochilview. Talbot, Bo'ness, Linlithgow , Bonnyrigg etc are the main draw in their own town, big Senior clubs apart. Pollok however really struggle to make much headway in the local area and in the end probably have one of the largest geographical spreads when it comes to where regular fans come from - I would guess a significant proportion live too far away to walk.

But there are small clubs from small towns at a high level - there is no incentive to invest in a Junior side as there is no prospect of the investment being recouped because of the almost total lack of prize money (without qualification for the Scottish Cup). Who knows who is out there and would be willing to put money into a side but can see zero point doing it at Junior level? Why? Because it's a complete lottery whether or not anything other than the result will make national press. People can mock Brechin, Alloa, Dumbarton etc but these are clubs with much higher profile than any Junior team, with much bigger budgets and with better long-term prospects.

If for arguments sake the WoS senior league was formed and the Juniors all came along, it would look like the present West Super Premier- so Kilsyth would probably be right where they are just now? The way some folk argue against the pyramid, it's as if every club is going to be replacing Cowdenbeath in SPFL League 2...

Jobby by name, jobby by nature!

The pyramid needs the Juniors for the simple reason that a pyramid narrows towards the top and gets wider towards the bottom as there are increasingly more teams at each level the lower you go. What we have is: 12 10 10 10 18 / 16 15 / 13 That is not a pyramid, it's an inverted anvil.

Well he lives in Edinburgh so not much walking over any water unless he wishes to join Gary Mackay Steven for a post beveridge splash about in the Water of Leith.

There is no difference between BSC Glasgow, Cumbernauld Colts, Bonnyton Thistle and Gartcairn / Rossvale. Edusport a different kettle of fish but they entered the pyramid at the lowest level and have won promotion to where they are on merit - by winning their league. In the case of BSC, there were a boys club, as were Bonnyton (with a good U21 side that has produced a number of great Juniors, past and present). Cumbernauld Colts did have an adult amateur side (still do?). Rossvale likewise plus 21s. Gartcairn a youth side that gained the adult junior team.