Raith Against The Machine

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.

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.

It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of where that money went.

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.

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.

What a player. What a man.

£50.

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.

Got away with one there. Definitely a handball in the box.

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.

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.

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.

There's a few pouring off the roof of the away end, aye.

Murray said in advance that he'd be resting MacDonald. I suppose that's basically a 4-1-3-2. Either Masson or Lang moving over to cover at right back. Mitchell and McBride on either side of Easton as the three, and then Gullan playing off Frederiksen. Interested to see how we'll manage to play two out-and-out strikers, with another filling in on the wing, and still not manage to touch the ball inside the box.

Hey look, it's our subs bench for tonight

I was in the Annapurna last week, and will therefore be fronting a Nepalese takeover bid in the very near future.

If Michael Dellios ever plays Championship football I'll get a Sammy the Tammy tattoo.

What do you think Ian Murray's motivation for not resolving that issue would be, if he had the means to do so?

I thought he'd been to Turkey and had that fixed.

He's a Dundee player. I think it's Derick Osei, although I could be wrong on that.

It's clear that the market hasn't gotten any better since the summer. There's not suddenly loads of young, promising strikers available for loan. As Murray says, it's the same faces being offered out to the same clubs. Connell, for all his faults, is a known quantity. Murray obviously knows what he's like around the place, and while he's not the ideal type or quality of striker we need, he's been underwhelming more than actively terrible. We've all seen much worse loan players from the Premiership. It's a tight squad, and games are coming thick and fast. If Murray wants to keep hold of a player he knows, and knows (presumably) that he can afford, I don't think that's a catastrophic error when there's precious little else out there.

Tinfoil hat stuff.

I don't think Stanton has a 'natural' position in the current system we're using. Not from the start. He's obviously not taking Brown's place and you don't really want him out wide, so he either replaces Spencer or Vaughan. He's not as good a 6 as Spencer is, and not a good a 10 as Vaughan. He's perfect to come off the bench, though, because he can come in for Spencer (or Brown) if you're chasing the game and need more drive, or he can come on for Vaughan and give you a bit more dig in the middle if you're holding on. That's not to say he shouldn't be starting, I think he's comfortably in our best eleven players, but you'd need to find a different setup to not be crowbarring him in a little currently.

PS. If big John had scored at the end there, I was on the pitch, along with the rest of Kirkcaldy.

Given we've only got 14 senior players, I think that goes down as a good point. Could've been more given how poor Dundee were in the first half, but equally we could've lost it by the end. As others have said, a proper Championship number 9 and we'd be deadly.