Raith Against The Machine

As predicted, we're missing that attacking point in midfield, but presumably the idea is to do our best and keep it tight until there's little enough time left that we can get Ethan Ross on. Tumilty also looks like a long season is catching up with him. He's still doing his running, and all credit to him, but he looks knackered.

Queen of the South-esque contrivance not to put the ball in the net from Varian. Looks like he's under the effects of some sort of monkey's paw curse.

Incidentally, I really like Musonda on the right hand side of a three. I think that's his optimal position, where you can get the best out of his various attributes. If by hook or by crook we can keep Tumilty, I'd have that as the starting point for next season's defence. Go shopping for a left wing back and then see if there are centre halfs available to improve on Berra/Bene/Lang.

This already feels like one of those days. Really minor in the grand scheme of things, but you can only laugh at that decision not to give the foul for a shove on Varian. Just a blatant straight arm shove We'll lose this 1-0 and probably pick up another daft red card along the way.

That's pretty much the only thing I would be confident in them dealing with.

Very interested to see how Greig Young gets on. I think a low key reason for a lot of our struggles this season has been the lack of a left sided "wing back" role, in either a four or a five. Liam Dick is very much a defender and while he tries to get forward, he's not a natural. It makes it very easy to cover Tumilty on the other side when you know there's not much chance of a big switch. It's another patched together team though, and I think we'll struggle. Ethan Ross clearly isn't fit and Aidan Connolly is absolutely shattered, but I think we'd need one of them in place of one of the midfield three for this to really work.

Is Cochrane any use, generally? He looks like the odd one out here, on a different wavelength from the rest of the Queens midfield.

Absolutely rotten vibes coming off Queens, not a chance they're winning this.

Well, the owner isn't the chairman anymore, so that's something, and it's not his direct proxy Sinton either. It's far from ideal that the new chairman voted for the Goodwillie deal, but I don't think there was any realistic possibility of a brand new outsider coming in directly to the chairmanship, so this is probably about as good as could be expected. And at the risk of repeating myself for the 400th time, what should really follow now is a sit down with the new chairman where he offers a full apology, an explanation of how things went so badly wrong, and what he's doing to make sure it never happens again.

It's marginally ahead of the "winning a derby against a team you're four places behind in the league" trophy, in the grand scheme of things.

Both teams have had 51 yellow cards. Rovers have five reds to Caley's one. I used the word "self-inflicted" a lot in reference to last night's game, but it applies to other aspects of this season too.

That's kind of my point. There's an emerging narrative that we've had this massive injury crisis (caused by watching too many videos) but it's been more of a selection crisis. I might be forgetting someone from the first half of the season, but our only real significant injuries have been Musonda (carried over from last season), Vaughan, Lang and Spencer. I suppose you could count Keatings too, but that seems to be more of a chronic issue and he was punted out on loan whilst still technically "fit". Since the start of the season, we've picked up a medium term injury and two long term. Is that significantly worse than other teams in the division? I doubt it.

Do we even have a statistically significant increased number of injuries compared to anyone else? Even our most recent extreme injury hit game against Arbroath, we were missing seven players: MacDonald: Injured in a collision in the previous game Berra: Injured in a collision in the previous game Benedictus: Suspended Lang: ACL, long term Musonda: International duty Williamson: Suspended Vaughan: ACL, long term In addition, Spencer was on the bench but probably not fit enough to play, he's recovering from a broken leg suffered in a collision mid-game. We also lost Jamie Gullan to an arm injury that game, following a collision. Having all those players unavailable certainly makes it difficult to win games, but I don't think there's any evidence there to feed into the "players aren't conditioned well enough" narrative. All the conditioning in the world isn't going to strengthen Brad Spencer's tibia or stop Jamie Gullan's shoulder from popping out. Lang and Vaughan are the two that you could look at as "preventable", in theory, with the right management, but those players are both clearly susceptible to that kind of injury, and prevention isn't an exact science. If it was, we'd never see recurring injuries again. We're definitely seeing players pulling up with minor injuries now and players who are tiring later in games, but the cause and effect is backwards. It's not that we have so many unavailable players because their conditioning is bad, it's that the remaining players' conditioning is suffering because they're having to play so much football. That's not to let the management team off the hook. There are clear issues when it comes to squad building, primarily the recruitment of players with known injury problems and the choice to go more than half the season with only one left back and two wingers, but it's not as simple as "sack the physio because he's making the players run too much on our plastic pitch and so they keep getting hurt" and it's certainly not because they're doing too much video analysis.

Either that or we're watching too many videos. No other possible reasons.

Unsubstantiated nonsense.

Think you've pretty much nailed all of this on the head, particularly that first half set up with Zanatta. As Ro Sham Bo says, Ethan Ross was struggling by the end of the final on Sunday, and he'd only come off the bench in that game after an hour, so he's nowhere near full fitness. He's also definitely more effective in the middle where he's got more space to burst into, rather than being stuck out wide, but we've only got two natural wide players in the whole squad so he's ended up out there a fair bit. Stanton hasn't really lived up to his early promise. I think the general reaction after his debut was "Holy shit, we've got two Brad Spencers, this is amazing" but he's not quite managed to impose himself on games as much as we'd hoped. Our early season midfield trio of Spencer/Matthews/Tait worked really well, even though sometimes those individuals didn't stand out. Tait wasn't having a great season but we've missed his forward drive, and Stanton hasn't been able to control games the way that Spencer has. And I think we saw last night that there's nowhere near enough incision in a Stanton/Matthews/Spencer midfield. Spencer has three league goals, Matthews has one, Stanton doesn't have any. That's not enough to support a lone striker. When we finished the game against Queens we still had Zanatta and Connolly out wide but with Ethan Ross in as a 10 (removing Spencer). That's infinitely more effective. Haha, amazing.

I agree with this. Has he had three starts in a row in the same position at any point this season? I'm not going to look it up, but I'd be surprised. Nobody's going to flourish in an ever-changing situation like that.

I imagine we'll see some posts about the Pars "wanting it more" but that's inane pish. That was the difference between a team who've been given simple instructions they know how to carry out, and one full of square pegs in round holes trying to do things they're not capable of. I did the Pars a disservice when I suggested earlier today that Thistle basically thumped themselves. Dunfermline are very good without the ball, and very well set up to take advantage of other teams being poor. They could've easily had four or five off the Rovers there. I'd stand by the suggestion that if the Rovers had scored first it would've reversed the scoreline, though. Once they had the lead the Pars could wait and pick the Rovers up but I don't know if they could've battled back with a more stubborn opposition in front of them. Frankly, though, that was never a concern. The Rovers didn't have a route to goal tonight. I think Varian's tame header in the last few minutes was the first attempt on target? Even the sort of f**k up that made the opener - Ambrose is more than capable of something like that, but would we have had two players close enough to take advantage? No chance. I'm going to give McGlynn the benefit of the doubt and say that neither Dick nor Mackie was fit enough to play and that the back four was essentially foisted on him, but even then, the choice to play out from the back was absolute suicide. I don't want to go overboard because I've been pretty harsh already, but when has Dave McKay ever shown that he has any of the attributes required to do that? He wins headers and makes tackles. He's good at doing that, but that's it. If you're playing Dave McKay, he should be under strict instructions to either play two yard passes or launch it. Anything else is madness. It's not his fault, it's just not his game. You'd be as well asking him to play in goal. Zanatta was deservedly hooked at half time, because I think that's the worst 45 minutes I've seen from anyone this season. Not just failing to make things happen, but actively detrimental. Again, I can only assume injuries/fitness kept Ethan Ross on the bench, but we needed someone behind Poplatnik to keep him effective. Failing to play a 10 at all is absolutely criminal and really calls McGlynn's judgement into question. We know that neither Varian or Poplatnik can do anything when they're that isolated. I have absolutely no idea how McGlynn thought we were going to use the ball once we got past the halfway line in that first half. Because we've still got to go to Firhill our season isn't over yet, but it feels like it is. Far too many players out there who clearly need a close season, and a management team who need to reflect on some long spells of dreadful footballing strategy this season that need to be rectified for next year.

I know we've got a multitude of injuries but McGlynn has absolutely thrown this away with his set up tonight. He punted Dave McKay out on loan earlier this season precisely because he can't play this system. Gave ourselves a starting point that was three steps behind. The Pars haven't had to be good and they've scored twice and should've had two more. Totally self-inflicted.

Is this Dave McKay's fucking testimonial? Every time we get the ball it goes to him. Keeper's rolling it out, defenders are squaring it, midfield is cutting it back. He must have the most touches of any Rovers player by a country mile.

Varian has the striker's instinct of a Thatcherite cabinet member.

They don't like it up 'em.

This sudden reversion to playing out from the back is bizarre in the extreme. Presumably the theory was that Spencer is back and he's the lynchpin that makes that work, but it's given him no time to settle back in, and completely fails to account for McKay at centre half and a wrong-footed Musonda at left back.

Defenders certainly started to figure him out and that blunted his effectiveness, but more significantly that saw his confidence drop off and that's really what's made all the difference.

Dario Zanatta with his worst 45 minutes of the season there, and he's had some pretty abysmal spells before tonight. The right back marking him is so far up the park he might as well be in Crossgates, which should leave Dario with a free run at Efe Ambrose, but instead he's been tripping over his own feet and fucking up three yard passes. Absolutely brutal. The best chance we've had was a shot from our centre-half-turned-left-back that didn't even leave his boot because he was fouled, which speaks volumes. Connolly has been too busy on Dom Thomas duty and our central three can't find any space at all. At the back, for some reason we've decided that the re-introduction of archetypal meat and drink (© @Francesc Fabregas) defender Dave McKay is the catalyst for passing it about again. For some reason everything is going through him, and it was only a matter of time before it cost us. Spencer has to do much better with his first touch but McKay needs to know its a bad pass to make. An actual footballing defender does. The Pars should've had another one but for Lawless blazing it over the bar, but again it was totally self-inflicted. Three defenders all sucked into the ball and absolutely nobody thinking about where the ball might end up. Really amateur stuff, but as I mentioned, exactly what happens when you're changing three of the back four from game to game. Frustratingly, the Pars haven't offered too much beyond those two chances they were gifted. They've been lightyears ahead of us but other than a couple of crosses to nobody, they've not been able to really be incisive in the final third. That should give us some hope for the second half and Ethan Ross might spark something, but I'm sticking with my pre-match prediction that we huff and puff for a while before the Pars get a second and end it.