Raith Against The Machine
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Posts posted by Raith Against The Machine
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Yet more "I believes" and "I thinks" from Steven MacDonald. Has he ever had an actual conversation with John Sim? Is all their communication handled through a mysterious third party? Have they divided the board room in two with a big piece of duct tape like an 80s sitcom?
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"Tyrone" on Sportsound giving updates on this game with all the brio of a man attending his own mother's funeral after a 30 hour shift down a salt mine.
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McBride, respectfully, hasn't got it. He did his fair share of running about on Wednesday but he really didn't impact the game. Just doesn't do enough with the ball. There's no way he should be starting ahead of anyone in that lineup.
Frederiksen can feel a little more hard done by, but he'll get his chance off the bench.
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17 minutes ago, Hank Scorpio said:
I don’t know a single person who’s going today, first time that’s happened this season. Think that’s pretty well reflected in the interest in this thread. When was the last time we had a game thread on page 1 a few hours before kick off?
I’ve no idea if we’ll have bodies back for this or not. Ideally we’ll get Millen back into right back for Masson and Connolly and Vaughan back into back the 11 as well. Could do with a win but would probably grudgingly take a draw.
Aye, can't imagine there'll be a huge away support. Having already travelled and paid into the Hamilton and Queen's Park games since the New Year, along with buying cup tickets for the game against the Rose, this is an easy one to miss.
Our "must win" game (as much as anything can be so at this stage of the season) was at Hamilton, and we managed that. As such, we're now as many points off the top of the table as we are second bottom. I'd take a point today too, just to keep the unbeaten run going and get another week out the way while we try to get players back fit.
This one has the potential to be much more 'season defining' for Cove than for us. A win here and they can start looking at mid-table consolidation with Hartley, but another loss and they've really got to worry about Arbroath, who surely won't be as bad as they've been in the second half of the season.
As you say, hopefully we get a good few of those important bodies back into the starting line up. McNeil kept a clean sheet on Wednesday but you'd really want MacDonald back in. Millen, too, given he's the only natural right back we've got.
What I'd really like to see is two strikers, but given Murray didn't take that option on Wednesday, I think we can safely rule that out. If Gullan's still struggling with that tightness, maybe we'll see Frederiksen start again, and Vaughan can maybe get a bit closer to him than McBride did as the 10.
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19 minutes ago, McGuigan1978 said:
That’s not right though, is it? There’s a Gordon Smith in the Hall of Fame, but it’s the one who won the league with three different teams, none of whom were Celtic or Rangers
Hahaha!
"This deal has been negotiated with the help of James Carlin (scout) and Gordon Smith (ghost)."
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8 minutes ago, The Tiel Burn said:
I personally liked him detailing in (....) that Manchester City are one of the worlds biggest clubs. Until that point I thought he was a slavering hoor who knew nothing about the game.
Also glad to see it was Gordon Smith [Scottish football Hall of Famer] not Gordon Smith [the guy who came off the bench for us in the Ramsdens Cup Final] who was involved.
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That's the fella. Tough luck.
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I didn't think your last one there was much of a claim, the ball is kicked up at the defender from fairly close range and his hands are in front of his face. The other one you've capped there was a much better shout, and there was one even earlier in the second half that presumably didn't make the highlights which I thought was a strong shout too, Liam Dick (I think) blocked a shot at the near post as he turned sideways, and it looked to me like it came off his hand which was away from his body.
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Can't believe I wrote an 8,000 word essay and I'm still not the most boring b*****d on the page.
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Finished the interview. I think the overwhelming takeaway is probably that nothing's really changed.
When the first story broke about the club seeking investment, accompanied with some vague notions of players being moved on, it set the cat amongst the pigeons and I think we were all left wondering what had suddenly created that situation mid-season. And it seems like the answer is... nothing. John Sim seems utterly unbothered about a lack of investment, in the same way that he has been for years.
Ultimately, I suppose you've got two possible streams of "big" investment. Local businesspeople who are getting involved because they value the club and/or it's contribution to the community, or people from outside the local area who have some other motive. The former is, naturally, a very small and not often replenished pool, and the latter has to be assessed very, very carefully.
It sounds like Steven MacDonald (more on him later) is constantly on the lookout for people in and around Kirkcaldy, as you'd expect, and the club is under a near-constant barrage of expressions of interest from groups abroad. Neither of those things have changed recently, and the parameters around those decisions haven't changed either.
I think for the last couple of weeks, the worry has been that there's some catastrophe that's occurred behind the scenes which has meant that the threshold for investment had been lowered, allowing charlatans like Dellios a route into the club, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
We can chalk the Silverbear stuff up to leaks from their end, I think that was pretty transparent as soon as it appeared on the BBC, but it doesn't explain why the first story went out about the club seeking investment. I can only assume that was a ploy to try and create some sort of leverage in those negotiations, but I can't really fathom the full thinking behind it.
It seems, anyway, that we'll just continue to plod along. The manager's budget is what it is, and the maintenance budget is what it is. We'll hope for a Scottish Cup run and a playoff finish every few years to offset losses in the others. That's not exactly a genius strategy, but it's what we've been doing for the last 15 years and Sim doesn't seem particularly bothered. Certainly there's no indication that he's going to be pulling £150k out of next year's playing budget, or anything like that.
There remains, however, most of the same questions about the bigger picture. John Sim continues to run a very fine line in disassociation. Everything seems to be down to the manager, the Chairman, or the board. He refers to things being under the chairman's remit during times when he was the chairman, without any recognition of that fact. It's maybe just his manner of speaking and I'm perhaps being a bit harsh, but I sat back a bit when he said "We need to do some succession planning". We? You hold all the cards, John. The framework for the ownership of Raith Rovers in one year, ten years, fifty years time is entirely within your gift. (Not to mention the fact that the Trust have been badgering Sim about succession planning for years now.)
I've prattled on about this before, but I'm once again going to ask that someone sets out the clear roles and responsibilities within the senior hierarchy at the club. To take this Silverbear debacle as an example; Steven MacDonald is in the papers shrugging his shoulders giving it "these fellas seem like good eggs!" on a Tuesday and "Good job we're well shot of those bad guys!" on the Friday, all the while claiming he's barely spoken to them and it's all down to John Sim. Sim then does his interview the following Monday and claims the negotiations have been handled by MacDonald. We've got an owner who apparently funds everything but never gets involved in budgets, and no finance director despite apparently being desperate for one. We did have a Chief Executive who almost certainly is no longer employed, but we've got absolutely no word on what happened, when, or whether she'll be replaced. So who's picking up her responsibilities in the mean time?
I understand the reticence when it comes to this side of things. You don't want to put up a statement that says "Steve's in charge of setting the budgets" because Steve's then going to get it in the neck when we lose £150,000 at the end of the year. But ultimately that accountability needs to be there. Your fanbase are your customers, and more pertinently on today's topic, your potential investors. They need to have faith that the club is in good hands, and is being well run.
If Sim isn't involved day-to-day? Fine. If he is? Fine. But the lack of transparency doesn't help anyone. And I think that applies to the financial side too. To be fair, Sim was relatively open about costs in his interview, but I think he could've gone further. David himself says he's been picking through the publicly available accounts to try and glean what he can to inform his questions. The club (and it's web of constituent companies) can be more open and forthcoming about the realities of its budgets. It'd be helpful to get an executive summary once or twice a year, not just for those at the AGM(s) to say; here's where we are, high level, in terms of income versus our expectations, and in terms of expenditure. This is what came up unexpectedly and had to be dealt with, this is what we're anticipating soon. Sim himself mentioned the "excellent" statement that Morton put out at the start of the season explaining their current situation to their support.
Particularly at this time of year, there's always a (somewhat tongue in cheek) lead in to questions like "Onto the thing the fans care about, what's the transfer window going to be like?" and while it's undoubtedly true that all fans care about the short-term transfer business and results on the park, there's also a significant number of supporters who care about the medium-to-long term future of the club, and want to be communicated to like adults.
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5 minutes ago, R.R.FC said:
Yeah, Davie has done an excellent job, Sim seems a difficult to interview. Very politician like in his reluctance to answer questions in a direct straight forward manner.
I was going to make this exact point. More than once, Sim answers a completely different question to the one he's been asked.
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Scott Boyd is back working for the club again? Did we know that?
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6 minutes ago, Against The Machine said:
It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of where that money went.
Ah, Davie goes back to this. A right good question on it, just a sharp listing of all those income streams that Michael mentioned above, and an ask as to why that "perfect storm" led to a loss.
The answer... is somewhere between condescending and obfuscatory. Some amount of shite about cup draws we didn't get years ago.
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2 minutes ago, Michael W said:
The stadium was moved to Stark's Park Properties because the Allied Irish Bank insisted on this for lending purposes. As part of the lease, the football club was to paint the stadium regularly. We went to the Allied Irish Bank for lending facilities because Clydesdale pulled our overdraft facilities.
The club hasn't been keeping up with the maintenance requirements above.
The above (club paying for stadium maintenance) is something that has bugged me as it seems incongruous with a usual landlord/tenant relationship. However it is good that the reason for this has been clarified.
I don't think it's particularly unusual for commercial property. Certainly I think its the normal within football when there's a stadium that's owned by one company but used solely or primarily by one club.
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5 minutes ago, Michael W said:
Listening to Sim and so will put forward some details as I get there.
We lost £100k last year. Would've been in profit if we'd finished 3rd rather than 5th. Bear in mind we played Celtic at Parkhead twice, had a televised game against Aberdeen and sold Dylan Tait for £100k.
f**k sake.
It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of where that money went.
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16 minutes ago, Skyline Drifter said:
Appreciate you meant the Championship but QoS did the League and Cup double in 2013 albeit we were in what was then known as Division 2. And in doing so prevented Partick Thistle doing the double with the Championship as both league winners met in the final.
If you really want to stretch definitions, the Rovers did the same in 2019/20, albeit the Cup was shared with Inverness and the league was decided on points per game.
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That guy who hates the Challenge Cup is a right mug. I might take the opposite approach and only watch our Challenge Cup games. Absolutely brilliant scenes at full time, you could see just how much that goal meant to the big man.
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What a player. What a man.
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On 31/12/2022 at 20:23, Hank Scorpio said:
Anyone want to buy a Faroese flag, then? Got one going cheap.
£50.
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4 minutes ago, Been going too long said:
My son is at the game and says big John offering more than connell does
certainly glad he has had a chance , well over due
He's just defended a couple of corners by himself. I don't imagine Connell would've done that.
You know how on Fifa there's a game mode where you can take control of a single player instead of the whole team? That's what this game has been like. Every single player on the park is putting in the same run-of-the-mill 5/10 performance, except Tom Lang who's flitting about the back line doing Cruyff turns and trying to go on mazy runs through the entire Queens' team.
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Got away with one there. Definitely a handball in the box.
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Frederiksen has been... fine? Like all of our strikers, he's had to drop deep to get involved, but his touch has generally been alright and he's managed to offload the ball a few times. Did as well as he could with the one reasonable cross, but it was a few inches too high even for him.
I think we're missing an opportunity sticking with the one striker. Gullan has been really well marshalled by the right back but he's been sellotaped to that touchline. Surely it'd help both him and John to be up top together.
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Two teams who haven't offered much, and the referee has been there with his whistle any time some football has threatened to break out. Just a very scrappy, midfield stalemate.
The Rovers have maybe been mildly more threatening, and Gullan did hit the bar from a corner, but neither keeper has really had to do much.
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9 minutes ago, Beachbum said:
The BBC version of the line-up
Back four is correct.
In front of that it looks fairly fluid, but probably best categorised as our usual 4-2-3-1. Easton has dropped back alongside Brown. McBride is playing as the 10, with Gullan left and Mitchell right.
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The New Raith Rovers Thread
in Scottish Championship General Chatter
Posted
I can't believe any of you are even humouring this. It's like someone coming on here and posting "Raith Rovers play in black and white stripes!". It's so demonstrably false it's not even worth engaging with the premise.