Raith Against The Machine

Someone needs to take £20 off Gullan every time he crosses the halfway line going backwards. He's the number 9 and half his touches come 60 yards from goal. He's working hard and he's nowhere near the biggest culprit for this defeat, but we've got absolutely no goal threat.

Nolan looks like he'll win his fair share of headers, but on this evidence, he'll not do any organising or play any passes more than 15 yards sideways.

Fairly tame chipped free kick forward. Stanton doesn't even get close to competing for the first ball which is flicked on. Dick does nowhere near enough to compete for it so its knocked down, and Megginson has an easy finish from 12 yards.

Oyah c**t that's brutal defending.

Sam Stanton seems to be actively deteriorating with every game he plays. The sooner we can put anyone else (Brown, Matthews, Spencer) into the base of the midfield, the better.

I missed the first 20 minutes thanks to roadworks outside Dundee, but what I did see was the Rovers totally dominate, and Cove miss a great chance from a long punt down the middle. As I said last week, you can't midfield your way to a strong finish. We're look set to lose soft goals and miss good chances. It's obviously early days for Connell but he had the chance to run through on goal only for a bad first touch to let Logan in. A second striker is definitely going to help Gullan, but they're both dropping back to the halfway line to get involved. It's fine if one of them does, but the other needs to be stretching the defence.

Some of our passing is "nice" but it's nowhere near quick enough. Just like against Stirling and Dumbarton, we're giving the defence time to drop in and cover all their angles.

Haven't missed some of the "patter" from elements of our away support.

Interesting dynamic, this one, because he's only contracted at Killie until January. If he's quite good in the first half of the season we might be able to pick him up permanently, but if he's absolutely brilliant we'll almost certainly lose him, and probably to a rival!

Eight goals in 27 league games last season. Doesn't scream "worldbeater" but it's only one fewer than our two main strikers managed between them last year, and in a team that was relegated. With any luck, he can be the finisher we've badly lacked.

This signing has surpassed all my expectations. The narrative! The narrative!

Came through Inter Milan's youth academy!? I absolutely do not care if he's totally pish, this is exactly the kind of patter signing I'm interested in.

Aye, a bit more positive news from Murray's interview. Looking for two more in, might not be ready to go straight into the starting line up after only a day's training, but he intends to have them stripped and in the squad.

In a way it's reassuring. Maybe we've made some phenomenal permanent signings over the last few days, we're just not telling anyone.

From the Aberdeen statement, it sounds like Ngwenya won't be with us all the time either.

Well look now, if we're going to turn our noses up at everyone who was bodied by Chris Duggan we'd not have... ah actually no, that was just him.

That's the FFP all over, isn't it? Got a fairly milquetoast interview out of someone and then when events render it totally meaningless, they just run it anyway, basically unaltered. Anyway, it looks like today has been the first proper flurry of Premiership loan signings, I've seen a few announced on Twitter across the lower leagues, but even if we do announce Ngwenya today you'd have to say that's an underwhelming bit of progress. Again, it would really clash with Murray's "the squad's too big" comments if he pads the one position outside of the midfield where we do actually have a natural replacement. As for the totally baseless rumour about Lee Ashcroft, I haven't seen him play in a while, but he's exactly the right profile for the kind of defender we need to bring in. There can't be many centre halfs out there who are (theoretically) within our range and have 200+ appearances at Championship level and above.

Because you get as many points for the first game as you do for the last?

Thanks I hate it.

You do realise that the one person who has the most to gain by bringing in new players is Ian Murray, right?

It is, yeah, but to be slightly more forgiving, he did say 72 hours for "some progress", and even if a deal has been agreed today it's probably tomorrow at the earliest before they're getting down to the ground to get some photos done for the announcement.

There's no RaithTV commentary because Davie and Niall are playing centre half.

I think you could just about get away with Liam Dick on the left hand side of a three, but only with two other dedicated central defenders. You can't play a back three with two full backs in it, it's a recipe for an absolute massacre. I don't know anything about this laddie from Aberdeen, but assuming he's more forward thinking than Dick, you could drop him in at left wingback and put Dick on the lefthand side of the three. But Millen would have to go to right wingback, which means you'd still be looking for two centre halfs before the game kicks off. Based on all the available information, right now I think we're looking at a back four of Ngwenya, Dick, Brown and Millen for Saturday. Which is... far from ideal.

I fucking detest players being played out of position, I really hope this isn't a long term feature of Murray's plans.

It's a slow day at work, so I just had a wee look at this. Usual caveat that this is based on five minutes Googling and some fag-packet arithmetic, not any Skyline Drifter style working knowledge. Every time a player is transferred between countries for a fee, 5% of the fee is held back and allocated to the clubs who helped develop the player (regardless of the player's current age). So if we take the reported €500,000 as gospel, €25,000 would be held back. It's then divided proportionately between any clubs that the player spent time at between their 12th and 23rd birthdays. I don't know how loan periods affect it, but Bates didn't leave us permanently for Rangers until shortly after his 20th birthday. I've no idea if he was at a boys club before joining the Rovers youth set up and when that might've changed, but if we assume for argument's sake that he was with the club from the age of 12, we'd be looking at something like €16,000 or £13,500. Even if he didn't join until he was 16 it'd still be about €9,000. Not the worst news in a week where we could do with some cheering up!