Raith Against The Machine

We should start offering cash incentives to away teams who win the toss and don't turn us around.

He's wearing a tie. 7-0 Rovers.

Can't wait to see Carson Alberto have the game of his life against us, again.

He also suggested that it was a real outside chance and it'd likely go down to the wire, but that gets lost in the subsequent noise too. I really wouldn't be surprised if it was Christian Doidge. Remember, in the same breath John Sim said that he'd have brought Ryan Hardie back permanently, something which has clearly never been a realistic possibility at any stage. I don't believe his talk of specific targets can be relied upon.

Forgive my outsider's ignorance here, but... do they? There seems to be a huge amount of discussion around what Colin Weir did or didn't intend, but is that not basically irrelevant now? It's not like he was some sort of football club fan ownership doyen who had this great plan in place. He was just a guy who won the lottery. Unless there are specific, legal instructions that must be followed (which presumably there aren't, at least not clearly, or there wouldn't be all this weird chicanery), is it not better to just forget about what this dead guy did or didn't want and just focus on the realities of what can be achieved given the current circumstances. I've been following the whole affair quite closely, and it goes without saying that the Foundation have quite clearly put together by far the more suitable vehicle for fan ownership to be achieved at Firhill. I think it's a really interesting case study, because I think if you asked the owners/board at any non-fan-owned club in Scotland whether they favour fan ownership, the vast majority would say "Yes! But of course there's this..." and then they'll have their own tailored version of why it won't work. We've just heard something along those lines at the Rovers. But at Thistle we're seeing the first example where there's a really solid, popular fan movement that's finding those already in power unwilling to give it up, to any sort of degree. I don't imagine it'll be the last. Still, good news about the buses.

He's played 616 minutes in League Two up here, with Stenhousemuir. That goal is from a pre-season friendly in July last year, nominally for the Blackburn Rovers first team against Leeds, although both put out young sides (as McBride wearing number 9 would suggest). He scored at least a couple of other goals in that pre-season, but only sat on the bench for the first team twice once the real stuff began. He had a very good first season in that Premier League 2, with 12 goals and 6 assists in 19 games, but as we've already said, the quality in that league is as terrible as its name is. His time at Queen's Park is a much more relevant comparison. We can only hope that, much like the aforementioned Barrie McKay, he hasn't tried a leg in his loan spells but gives his head a wobble now that he's out in the "real world". Time will tell, and as long as he's being paid less than Zanatta, it's probably an upgrade on the latter half of last season, however he performs.

That sounds like an absolutely brutal crowd to be a part of.

Ethon Varian scored a goal every other game the season before last.

Not exactly what you'd call rave reviews...

Aye I've just deleted that because it's 95% gibberish.

Would it be reading too much into "clearance" to suggest it's someone coming from outside Scotland? It's quite novel to be potentially just a few hours away from an announcement with basically no "ITK" indication of note. I expect we'll still get the usual Scott Burns "Rovers due to announce [Player]" update immediately prior, but it's nice to have a bit of mystery at the moment.

The impression I got was that he was confident on getting both, but that we might only get one done today.

He was on trial with the Rovers at the beginning of pre-season. Didn't really have much of an impact in the couple of friendlies he got minutes in, and obviously wasn't a superstar in training either. I had no idea he was still in Scotland.

That would be incredible

I hear the club's solicitor passed him a cheque, but it took him three goes to get it under control. As my Granny always used to say, "if a footballer's YouTube showreel is comprised entirely of clips from Spanish leisure centres, he's probably not good enough for the Scottish Championship".

Unless Spencer has suffered a major setback, Tait doesn't make any sense.

When talk of marquee striker came up, I wondered if it might not be Doidge. I'm sure he's said he's only willing to play in Scotland for at least the next year or two because his other half is completing a degree up here, and his form hasn't been good enough for a fair while to justify regular game time at Hibs. I think there was some talk of Dundee being interested though, and I'd be surprised if there weren't bottom half Premiership teams willing to take him on too. It'd be a big coup, but ranks as hugely unlikely at this point.

"Boo! Sign a striker!" "Okay, I've signed a striker." "Not that one! Boo! Booooo!"

Yup. We've only got two natural central defenders available at the moment, and Murray took one of them off for a striker with more than half an hour still to play. I don't necessarily have an issue with that, and his next change was to send a winger on for his right back, but I do think that we need a proper strategy if he's going to do it regularly (which he clearly is). He put all these forward players on but there's not one of them who'd look out of place in Snow White's front room, and we spent the last fifteen minutes launching long balls at them which Thistle, predictably, won and then took to the corner.

I agree with your diagnosis, but I don't know that I like your solution. Gullan as the sole striker looks isolated and uninvolved unless he drops deep or wide, but I don't think that changes by swapping in Connell. From what I've seen of him - which is all of his Rovers' minutes, albeit that's not a huge sample - I don't see that Connell has the skillset to make a difference in that same role. I won't bang on about it again, but we need a forward with a different profile. I don't think they necessarily need to be a goalscorer, but they need to be able to hold their own against big centre halfs and bring others into game. Both Gullan and Connell would benefit massively from having that kind of teammate.

We only listed six subs, and Mahady didn't come on. We did, however, make subs in four separate stoppages, which we wouldn't have been able to do without MacDonald being counted as a concussion.

I'd say he's significantly better than our previous second striker, Man Who Doesn't Exist.

I've never been to a Manager's Q&A, the very idea makes me cringe. You know it's going to be full of clowns asking why we're much worse at throw-ins than everyone else (we're not, nobody is, throw-ins are just rubbish), but if I did go to one, I'd love to hear Murray (or McGlynn) explain why they choose to do that. There's obviously a good reason for it, you see it at all levels, there was a European game I saw this week where a team did it (maybe PSV at Ibrox?) but to my uneducated eyes, the risk of penning yourself in seems so high when you could just stick your most defensively inept player up on the halfway line and at least give the opposition something to worry about.

Never doubted him for a second. Give linesmen footballers' wages.