renton

To be fair, I only saw him in the 45 minutes against Edinburgh City but he looked utterly - eh, I dunno, nothing.

Yeah, at this rate I don't think progression through the cup games will be easy, or even likely - even if we have guys back by then they'll be short of game time.

He didn't say that.

3 games with our third choice goalie and no where near a fit 1st choice starting defence. Only having had one guarenteed starting central midfielder for about 60 minutes over two games, A creditable draw against a strong, cup winning, Europe bound St Johnstone?

Yeah, unfortunately they are all injured.

Watson. Thank f**k.

And Stewart can't play in two positions, which means a start for Vaughan.

Yeah, but how many centre backs would you have Murray sign?

I actually wonder if they are semi fit (or at least doing their running etc), but Murray doesn't want to risk them through a pre-seaons game, and will throw them in at the cup game....

Start the season as we ended it, leaking goals like a sieve. heard something about Hill, what's up with Watson and Barr? Three first choice senior centre backs for the first time since Murray took over and they are all injured!? Fucking typical.

I'm not so sure, It involves breaking it down into smaller subsamples and weighting them to meet a chosen composition. It can't help but introduce a greater uncertainty in the final numbers. The other pollsters all show around 15-17% SNP voters wanting to vote no, so it's not like the others are sampling nothing but rabid nats, so why was the 'correction' necessary - what made YG feel that it was a necessary correction to make? Certainly Kellner laid out his theory on the YG blog and equally Survation responded robustly to that. As you say, they may be right, they may be wrong - but I'm struggling with the logic of introducing a greater uncertainty into your numbers.

ICM, Panelbase, Survation and TNS all weight by recalled 2011 vote (on top of weighting by age group, male and female) Yougov weight by 2011, but don't ask for a recalled vote but rather by inforation YG held over from immediately after that election. Lately they've also gone to the effort of splitting down that SNP vote into SNP 2010 SNP 2011 and Labour 2010 SNP 2011. Ispos-Mori wieght by some other demographic profile that I'm uncertain of. Remember also, that how the pollsters collect the data must affect their performance. Online pollsters may well end up asking the same people over and over (or at least there is a risk of that), face to face (or even phonebank) polling is less anonymous and may lead to false answers from those being polled being uncomfortable in airing their views. Landline phone banking may lead to oversampling one demographic to the expense of others, meaning that you'd radically upweight the other demographics, introducing error from small sample sizes.

Yup, TNS and ICM polls have been pretty damaging, Though in the latter case, ICM has been the most volatile pollster in terms of showing radical swings from month to month, it's hard to know with them what's really going on (and that gender breakdown looks really suspect, I'll bet you in the next ICM poll that the gender gap is back). For me TNS was the worst in terms of news, certainly in terms of how DKs were getting squeezed. Reading that the unicorn unpublished Ipsos polls reckoned 80% of DKs would vote yes, but then Ipsos didn't have massive numbers of DKs so how much of a difference that would make is questionable, by comparison even if said information were true (which it may well not be). Just have to keep plugging away at the minute, it's been a bad month and yes really need to find some momentum again over late summer.

Yeah fair does

If you look at our likely bench for the first game of this season vs that of the opening day of last season, we are a wee bit better off.

No went up by the same amount, DKs starting to get squeezed and it's splitting 50/50 at best. Not great.

Some pollster has the No lead in the range of 4-5 points, other pollsters have it in the range of 14-16 points. Clearly, both can't be right and if it were a 52/48 No win, then the first group are the more accurate.

Even if Yes do lose, someone is going to look ridiculous: as a professional pollster trying to drum up business, being innacurate to the tune of 15 points or more is probably not a great advert for you.

McGlynn's record with goal keepers ain't great to be honest.

Not seen much of him, played the whole game against Edinburgh City on Wednesday night there, not the quickest by the looks of it (either that, or their number 9, Alum was a total speedster)

Bollocks, away to Forfar would've been amazeballs.

Guarenteed, surely.

i used to have it, loaned it out somewhere and never saw it again, to this day it's the only Manics album I don't have either as a CD or as a MP3/FLAC file. Tristesse is a good song, the rest of it is just so ordinary and laboured to my ear.

I don't know why they just didn't make that a closed doors game. The Rovers were treating it like a kick about to be honest, even Moon when he came on didn't seem to be bothered running the length of himself. I don't think you can rightly pick out any kind of meaningful lessons from it. Certainly Bates and Ellis shouldn't play together at centre back maybe? But that seems an obvious lesson anyway. Mathews looked ok, if a bit slight of build and not possessed of the blistering pace of a proper modern right back. Callachan should try to do less? He was maybe the one guy who tries to run about a bit, but tended to take way too many touches and slow things down - it was like he was channeling Davo. Nade looks alright, and Stewart looks..... something? I think we tried to go for a bit of a fluid front line, with Nade at the tip, Elliot in a free role behind him and Stewart and trialist (whisper it....ARCHIE CAMPBELL) playing wider roles, at least in the first half, but, down the right (trialist ARCHIE CAMPBELL and mathews) we got exposed a fair bit. As I said, we were barely treating it like a game of football, and you can't take too much away from it, but at the same time I'm deflated by how ordinary we look, with none of the passing style play we had last year, even when we were losing, obviously some of that is not having a proper set of centre backs and a right back, nor our starting midfield (never even saw Scott) but yeah, we looked... ordinary. Shame that we will end up losing out on Galbraith.

I dunno, it still sounded like them, just them trying to pastiche something else. I love RTF as well, but Futurology shades it for me. It helps that Wire has developed as a musician in the last decade (his bass playing used to be functional at best, and he never got involved with songwriting) and that Bradfield is more willing to contribute lyrics - Moore remains this unknowable brilliant musician at the middle of it all. So the old songwriting duty barriers have dropped and I think there are more ideas, and more craftsmanship about them. If I had to rank the albums at the minute? THB EMG Futurology JFPL RTF TIMTTMY KYE PFAYM GE SATT Lifeblood GATS