VictorOnopko

If it's Caldwell, I'm happy with that choice and relieved that it isn't an absolute dinosaur like Jim Duffy or Yogi Hughes. He's got his work cut out to make anything of this season other than survival in the 2nd tier, though. Archibald's legacy in terms of the squad he left behind is pretty feeble, particularly in defence. Losing O'Ware was a blow and much will depend on when he's back, how quickly he is up to speed, and who we get in in January (but by that time it may be too late to challenge). In the meantime, Keown and McGinty (with __???__ at right back) are weekly bombscare material (similar to playing Danny Devine for a season in the premiership).

The last 15 months or so were so stagnant under Archibald that even Jim McIntyre would be a reasonable choice and a likely upgrade. If the new man can do anything at all with our defence to make it look like they actually practice defending during the week, and ultimately if he can steer us to midtable respectability in the second tier, then he will have been worth bringing in. If we'd kept AA on we would have been in imminent danger of consecutive relegations. He assembled a poor squad this summer, so whoever gets the gig will have to bring fresh ideas, be able to organise and motivate mostly very mediocre players, and hope above all that Bannigan stays fit (as he's quickly reestablished himself as our star again).

The SPFL days, eh? So, without AA you expect us to drop completely out of the league and be in the fifth tier soon? We certainly had a strong chance of sinking straight to the third tier if we had kept him on- and avoiding that is still the main priority. Archibald did well to keep us in the Premiership for several years, but he ran out of ideas a long time ago, and last season was a shambles. We played the whole year with no dig in midfield, and he did nothing to fix it until he brought Martin Woods (!) in, with us already deep in trouble. He signed and played Danny Devine all year. He persisted with Barton. We were rubbish. Then, he gets more time than almost any other club would have allowed, and the nod to "rrebuild" the squad to take us back up. We start the season four short of a full bench, and with no proper right back (we still hae no proper right back). The best players at the club pre-date his reign. The football is almost offensively bad, week in week out, and that is not the fault of the fans. You are in a very small minority if you truly believe that Alan Archibald was badly treated. Following our relegation we have lost 5 games out of the first 8 in the second tier this season and been knocked out the diddy cup by East Fife. Wake Up!!

Apparently Ratnamara was darkening the doors of Firhill with his presence yesterday - surely the board wouldn't... would they? Like many others, I am slightly sad to see AA finally go - he got us to the top flight and kept us there, although it was rarely pretty. He's also a nice guy who loves the club. However, last season was an unmitigated disaster and there is no doubt that he should have walked after our feeble, ignominious relegation. To have allowed him to "rebuild" in order to (allegedly) "be competitive" and challenge for promotion was massively naive given that by the fag end of last season, when we were, for example, being pumped in vital games by Ross County, Killie etc., he could no longer motivate the team or spring any kind of tactical surprises. He's never been any good at spotting and recruiting players and there was no reason why that would suddenly change. Our best players , tellingly, are those who were here before he started (Doolan, Erskine, Bannigan - not Christie elliott though, obviously). This season, our football has been rancid, with the exception of QOS at home, which was fine going forward, and only rancid at the back. The away at Dunfermline fiasco sadly sums up where he took us to - a disorganised rabble with no right back, having bafflingly been put out defensively to try to steal a point from a bang average side, and which failed to do so because he forgot to get a RB in this summer. It was a bit like the now infamous cup game against ICT where Lyle Taylor had just returned and yet both he and Doolan were benched at home in favour of Ryan Stevenson. I was there and couldn't believe what I was seeing. Thanks for the memories...

Great news. Given that we don't really have a functioning defence, and forgot to sign a right back. from now on we should be aiming to be a Scottish Championship version of Ardiles' Spurs - score one more than the opposition, 6-5 win kinda thing. I'm sure AA will go for that.

Archibald in the BBC report: "In the first game of the season down at Ayr we had three subs. The difference now is we have a full bench and we actually could pick and choose who goes on. Long may that continue. We've waited a long time to get the guys back." Is it just me, or was the main reason we had three subs to start the season with because AA simply hadn't bought anywhere near enough players over the entire summer? It wasn't really the result of an injury crisis, so this seems like quite a bizarre thing to highlight in his own defence. Since then we've got Banzo back - but lost O'Ware long term. The reason we have more players now is that we did a lot of last-minute panic buying, of which the best example is Ntambwe. We played well yesterday, other than the two brain-farts for QOS to score from, immediately putting us on the back foot, but boy do we (still!!) need an actual right back.

All of the above is correct, but the cup attitude really sticks in my craw. The manager/club have said that every season as soon as we go out with our usual whimper, even though our fans have paid good money to travel/watch the snivelling performances we usually deliver in the cups (see discussion elsewhere on the less than wonderful memory of Aberdeen away in the cup a few years back when we created zero chances and basically just cringed in our own half for 90 mins, despite having an OK squad at the time). It's not really good enough to say "didn't matter anyway" every single time, especially since even when we were in the Premiership, it was an absolute slog most of the time week to week. Here's an idea - why not put out a better team and try harder to win the game?? At least it would cheer some fans up, which is what Comical Gerry apparently wishes? Rather than getting gubbed by East Fife? Which is down there with Culter as a facepalm result.

Yesterday was a pleasant surprise. If Ntambwe can play the enforcer rule, if Bannigan can stay fit and actually string a good run of games together, and if McGinty is indeed much better than he had first seemed, then we're looking not too bad despite the slow summer and all the squad building concerns. Still need a right back, but impossible not to be happy with yesterday (especially as the comedy disallowance didn't come back to haunt us!). We should, of course, be given a 2-0 win and Doolan's goal recorded as a goal in retrospect ;-)

According to Chick (oh gawd, he's at Firhill today....), Falkirk "burgled" Ray McKinnon yesterday.

Much as this has all been very funny indeed, if Morton end up with Hopkin installed as manager then they will potentially have done quite well out of it (albeit at the cost of having been completely humiliated in the short term).

Fair enough that we should see how the team gets on in the next few games. However, it's also fair game in the meantime to criticise these apparently panicked, ultra-last-minute signings of players no one else wants (including the fact we have no recognised right back in our entire squad - Elliott is, at best, a utility player with no obvious strong position). We've been fed a series of "competitive budget", "quality signings" messages all summer by our board presumably to sell season books. If the current squad had all been brought in by 6 weeks ago, many/most fans would have been extremely disappointed by the standard. Yinited fans seem delighted to get rid of Scobbie. Let's hope he proves them wrong - but Devine didn't prove ICT fans wrong when we signed him., and Archibald has a very poor record of recruiting defenders. If you think it's cringeworthy to point all this out, then good for you.

Either Arsene Archibald thinks that this is a decent squad with a good chance of promotion (in which case he is a shit and delusional manager), or he has had three months to rebuild the squad, has started the season unable to fill the bench, and has ended up with no genuine RB and a honking defence (in which case he is a shit and incompetent manager).

Hmmm...

McGinty and £eown for the foreseeable, then? Still, at least our overall play is easy on the eye just now, and the manager's giving young talent a chance.

Yesterday was a sh1t result, and the fact remains that, despite the intrigue around Coulibaly, we started the season well short of players, are still short, have taken 3 points from 9, and AA, in his usual way, has stubbornly refused to play our best young talent (Fitzpatrick) in a game where it's blindingly obvious that that's what is needed. He's almost certainly done as a manager.

If you complain to the BBC you will get a template response from Capita, who run the BBC's "Audience Services" from, I think, a call centre in Belfast, if you get anything back at all. No one at Sportsound or BBC Scotland will be even vaguely aware of your complaint. If public opinion mattered to the BBC, Chick Young would never have had a career in sports journalism. His continued presence (providing irrelevant, ill-informed, mistake-ridden, childish drivel and virtualy indecipherable match reporting) on Sportsound is the best evidence there could possibly be that BBC Scotland don't care about high quality programming or shaking anything up. Give me an ex-player any day over Chick, no matter how bad they are.

I like Morton; they are a proper old club who have had some very trying times. Good day out (albeit via Gourock); always a good pitch too. I think you're mistaking a dislike of your team for disdain at your ("gormless") attempt to slag Thistle off for signing a player who may not play immediately - or even at all - given that your own team, as you rightly admit, made an even more basic registration f*ck up. If you think that pointing that out makes me "raging" and "gammon-faced", so be it. I also can't help you if your post was so poorly written that the "we'll be there" part was unclear. Again, what did you mean? That you're proud Morton will continue to hang around in the second tier indefinitely? A lot of our fans are annoyed at the club's poor communication (plus ça change), which makes it unclear whether the situation is as they expected, is just a big mistake, or is somewhere in between. On balance, it's probably worth a try to get Coulibaly signed and then cleared, given how good a player he is.

Where, still in the 2nd tier? The 3rd, again? Or maybe picking up another of your prestigious 4th tier trophies which makes you much bigger than Ayr? As for gormlessly handing contracts to ineligible players - isn't that what Morten did with Tidser not long ago?

Translation: "we didn't bother telling you anything at the time but we can confirm that he's not cleared to play and that's not going to be as easy as usual. Fans - stop showing interest in our possible new signing or speculating about whether or not he will kick a ball". "There's no cost to Partick Thistle... other than the time it has taken to type out this surly message".

We appear to be teetering on the brink of either confirming we are a badly-run shambles by belatedly attempting to sign a striker who (as other clubs had already sussed out) can't play, in a desperate attempt to boost our threadbare squad after a summer of transfer inactivity, OR pulling off a signing with the ability to transform our season, and which has incidentally already raised seethe levels to the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza among fans of other clubs (including the Super Js, apparently, even though we're no longer in the same division and Cerny is no longer our goalie). I wonder which way this one will fall?

How good's your fan? If he can get 15 goals this season we'll have him, despite the risks involved.

impressive signing, delighted with that. And here was me thinking that the manager didn't have a Master Plan.

The club will definitely get Fitzpatrick tied down. We're brilliantly run, have a highly competitive budget, a squad full of competition for places, and we're especially good at basics like always getting the right clauses into all player contracts.

Did he definitely sign for them prior to their demotion? If so that's a fair point, although it should also be noted that he failed to find a club for quite a while after exiting Caley Thistle. Like you said, I wasn't really using the 3rd div thing to criticise him. I'd still be (pleasantly) surprised if he makes much of an impact tho. Nice to have something to be optimistic about having picked up 3 points against Falkirk, although a) they seem to be in even more disarray than us; and b) I wish, just for once, that we could cruise to the end of a game rather than enduring an agonising last few minutes of clinging onto a narrow win. Not least because we usually fail to manage it.

I hope Mutombo is absolutely brilliant and scores (or creates) loads of goals for us this season. He seems to be in the Erskine mould of being very unpredictable as he doesn't know himself what he's going to do next. I'm also glad we got someone (anyone!) in. Given that he's been plucked from the 3rd division in Croatia well after the season has started here, and comes with dire warnings from Caley fans (who were spot on about Devine), expectations obviously have to be kept pretty low - but who knows, maybe he'll surprise the gloomier among us.