SuperHans

I'd be disappointed if he was still with us. I'd like to think that "the old pals act" won't apply when Smith has such a small margin for errors. If only he supported Hibs then maybe Bambino could let us know what his plans are, where he's going on holiday, what he likes for breakfast and what his dick tastes like.

Dougie Hill was a good player for us when we needed him. As far as having him in our squad now? I wouldn't touch him. I think bringing someone in who's on his way out of football would be a backwards step. Bambino really is the man in the know though... if he's not shining Vaughans boots, he's deliberately blocking his mum and dad's toilet so 'Douglas' can come round and fix it and feed him another piece of irrelevant information that he can then go and post onto a football forum.

Beat appointment we could have considering who the candidates were. From my understanding the Campbell rounders were true but he turned us down. If it was Bollan, Young or Smith, I'd happily give Smith the chance over the others. Easton will likely be assistant and due to small squad size, I'd imagine the development team will be pretty much seen as fringe players. Hopefully it's all announced tomorrow and we can all get behind Smith and look forward to winning the league!

Finally!! Someone realising that regardless of how loud we shout for a new CEO or BOD, there's hardly a never ending que of directors with the cash to invest in the club or people with the expertise or time to run a club the size of ours full time. I think we definitely need someone to be running the club on a day to day basis. The sad thing is, despite all his criticism and failings this season, we don't know what kind of job he's actually doing behind the scenes. If he did leave then what could the repercussions be? I personally don't think he will be in the same role next season. He is now an elected member of Perth City Council which I'm sure has full time commitments in itself so can't imagine him juggling the 2 positions unless his job is split with someone else.

Well either the board are of the same opinion as you or he's not interested in the job. It's not for us to say how long he wants to be out of football for or what his personal situation is. I wouldn't go as far as to say he'd be a shite appointment though. I think St Mirrens collapse, since he was let go, from their highest ever league finish shows just how good a job he was doing there.

First of all, Paul Hartley will likely be looking at a better move possibly down south or continue at the level he was at for Dundee. To think that he would risk his managerial career to drop from the Prem to League 1 to a team with as low a budget as we have compared to what he's used to is delusional. And with regards to both of your points. Who's to say that they want the job? We can't just pluck names out of a hat and expect them to jump at our beckoning call.

Why all this negativity? Bollan doesn't bother me in the slightest. Great playing career, his managerial statistics and experience is better than other names thrown about in the last few weeks and as for his inability to develop the young players, that's what Craig Easton is there for. I think we need to have a bit of a reality check here. What are you expecting?? We don't have the budget to be brining big names, we are in League 1 so our position is hardly attractive to someone like Paul Hartley or Danny Lennon and quite frankly we are in a fortunate position where we can pick from teams in a lower position than us. I'd love to see what everyone was saying when we appointed McKinnon. The Brechin manager who had less of a win ratio and experience than Bollan, Campbell and roughly on par with Young. Let's not be too quick to jump the gun for a change.

That would almost make sense. These guys are only training 2 hours per day tops and will likely have about 2 days off per week as well. The fact that we're debating minimum wages and how many hours a FT player will actually work, shows just how long a summer it's going to be. I have heard stories about when Lambert went to Dortmund that he couldn't believe they did 2 sessions in a day on some training days. The more young talented players we can send abroad to learn the better.

For all the 'doom and gloomers' out there. I found this article last night and brought back a lot of bad memories - http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12149804.Raith_and_a_riches_to_rags_story_Euro_joy_to_cash_crisis_in_five_years/ From the days of Kelly coming in and the collection buckets rattling around Starks to now, its safe to say that despite relegation and last seasons mess up, we are in a much better place.

That would be over the course of a yearly salary as well. Pretty sure players are contracted and mostly paid through the time scale of their contracts so it all really depends on the time scale the contract is set to. But I'll take the point and still suggest that even if we did drop 25% on the wages, which is what's been rumoured, then we could still manage to attract a number of good League 1 players to the club. Not to mention our ambition, facilities and hopefully manager. Have to disagree on that point. Managers want full time or completely part time. No point in having players that can't train at the same time as the full time players. The guys on FT contracts will be training in the morning or throughout the day, they're not going to come along on Tuesday and Thursday nights to train with the PT guys. This was the big factor with McGurn when we eventually had to call it a day for him at the club.

We couldn't beat a part-time Brechin team over 2 games. Our team was at a complete low point, players and manager weren't getting on, crowd on their back etc. But if we had been playing teams like Brechin over the course of the season then I'd have fancied our chances even though our team was in a terrible state. The last 2 appointments haven't been great. The first one was definitely a bad move but the Hughes appointment was only a bad appointment I hindsight. We could go back through this thread and find plenty of people happy with Hughes getting the job. The BOD are the same people that brought in McKinnon. Unfortunately, there's people wanting a young manager so we can start this 5 year plan. But by doing that, we run the risk of hiring someone with little or no experience of full time football. Is this a risky move? Wouldn't this be seen as a gamble from the board? So we have the option of a more experienced manager, someone who's won leagues and worked with all kinds of players throughout Scottish Football and been in the game for a long time. We can't have him, he's a dinosaur! He's no focus on the youth and he's not going to be part of this 5 year plan we all want. Either way, the only thing we can do is wait, inevitably moan about the appointment and hold our breath until the first few games of the season and see if the BOD have made the right decision.

Hands up, my maths was slightly off there. But my point remains that paying £600 per week freed up by releasing a distinctly average player will likely help provide wages that will be better spent at League 1 level.

I think if you look back far enough you'll see that when McGlynn came in. The first season or 2 we actually had one of the lower budgets in the second division because of all the cut backs that we had to make thanks to Claude Le Fraud. Part-time football, coaching staff washing the shirts, small squad etc. It was a lot worse than where we are now. Thankfully due to Cup runs, good financial management and consistent crowds at Starks our financial situation is far from that of what it was back in the darker days. Speculation is basically what the name of this Raith Rovers thread should be. I'm not claiming to be 'in the know' I'm just stating what I actually know first hand. We have players under contract that we will try to keep, we will be letting players go that free up more wages, we will be bringing in players that we believe will win us this league and by staying full time this is giving us the best chance to do that.

Rubbish! Our budget will be by far the strongest in that league. Ayr had the smallest budget last season and Airdrie are keeping theirs tight as to build themselves gradually through predominantly youth full time contracts. We have assets to move on, players under contract and a big clear out of wages that were misspent last season. £600 per week for the likes of McHattie, even half of that would get you one of the better players in League 1 on a full time contract. The club are quite correctly taking their time on appointing a manager that they believe can get us up. They're taking time to ensure they do t make the same mistake a third time round and their taking their time to get a plan in place. But yet people still want to criticise them..?

So we've become a much more stable club since our last relegation and thanks to that stability we will be in the strongest position possible to come straight back up. There's no crystal ball here, just using my brain. If you've got one, you should try using it for thinking before you start typing away or imagining shoving musical instruments up people's arses. As for putting your house on Raith to win the league. Wouldn't be a bad bet, we're the strongest team in that league, biggest home support, biggest budget, best facilities and a strong enough platform to come back up at the first time of asking. Having said that, if you lose your house, you're always welcome to stay with me.

Sacking him at that point wouldn't have been justifiable and would have likely had implications on getting him out of his contract. Jack Ross was appointed in October, by the 1st of Jan, Locke had actually only lost 5 league games but had drawn a lot. When we sacked him in February we had lost 11 which included a run of 6 defeats in a row. So to argue that the club didn't sack Locke when they should have is a tough one. Knowing our fans, if he was sacked after only losing 5 games, there would be people right now complaining we sacked him too soon! I can also remember everyone chanting his name when we were 1-0 up away to Hearts on the 25th of January, 3 weeks before he was sacked... Like I've said, we're a fickle bunch. Pre season hasn't started yet!! It doesn't start for another couple of weeks. Everyone's on holiday. There's very little 'football business' getting done right now which obviously makes the job a little bit harder and take longer.

Jesus Christ! Calm down, put the violins away and dry your eyes for f**k sake. This is not the worst situation we have ever been in and far from the the worst case scenario. The last time we were relegated the club had been decimated, almost bankrupt and we were organising bloody walks round the bevy park to get enough money to bail ourselves out! Someone will be appointed, people will be pissed off about it whatever the decision, players will come and go. We're full time, biggest budget in the league and hold all the cards. Granted last season was a car crash but it's over. Get on with your life, go on holiday, pull yourself away from P&B, vote and look forward to next season! There's nothing that we can do apart from support the team. Look at St Mirren, they got behind the club and stick together and pulled it off. All we seem to do is argue amongst ourselves and try to find out what fucking Dick Campbell is up to.

Calderon wasn't in the picture on Bobby Linns Twitter...

Great idea, so the statement that the club have a shortlist and are interviewing isn't good enough, you basically just need to know how many people are on the short list... And if they did mention the numbers of the people that are interviewed, surely that will just make rumours even worse as you'd get the 'in the know' chaps flexing their ability to extract information out of someone so that they can show everyone how important they are on an Internet forum.

Why? What do you want to know. "So far we've interviewed a few candidates and we'll make a decision in due course." That's going to really clear things up isn't it..? Just wait till the decision is made, based on the opinions floating about with regards to what the shortlist seems to be. I think the board are on a hiding to nothing. Dick Campbell - football dinosaur, bigot and doesn't like the youth. Steve Aitken - Hasn't actually done anything at Dumbarton considering our amazing fall from grace kept them up. Never been full time and only won League 2 with Stranraer. Darren Young - Only won League 2, had a bad season last season, inexperienced, bit of an idiot and a townie. Craig Easton - No managerial experience, only won the East of Scotland Dev League. Barry Smith - Nothing too spectacular as an manager. 34% career win record. Less than 10% better than Gary Locke Paul Hartley - Won the FFP pole so must be a shoe in. Deluded if he'll be wanting to come to us. So based on what people have been saying regarding the above managers over the last few days, we're fucked either way.

I'd imagine it's a lot harder to try and sort this position out so soon after the season especially since we are at least 1 week behind the other clubs who didn't have to take part in the play-offs and probably also the fact we didn't expect to have been beaten in the first round of them. The fact that it's come down to complete speculation based on who was photographed in a bar in Magaluf really does show just how bad things have got for us. All these people that are 'in the know' are doing a great job of stirring the pot. The fact that the board are taking their time on this decision is a positive. The margin for error on their part is tiny. 1 wrong appointment could spell the end for most of them. Let's just all relax and take it easy. Getting so worked up over some dick isn't going to solve anything.

Why are you so confident about Easton?

So you won't be "amazed" if it's not Easton anymore? Fickle bunch us lot eh...

Clyde appointed Annan manager as their new manager. Leaves Stark and Young still open for the job..?