Mr November

The other one looks a bit like Reece Willison who was Airdrie’s third choice keeper last season. He only played a couple of games but generally looked quite shaky, would do fine as a cheap backup though.

I think Currie will start, he had a good season at Stranraer and I don't think he would have come without knowing he'd be starting initially. Hutton is a very good backup though, it's good to have two proven keepers at this level and I think Currie will be an improvement on Gallacher who never really convinced me. Other than that I pretty much agree with that team. We certainly have a lot of options in attacking midfield/out wide (Stokes, Carrick, Thomson, O'Reilly, Roy, Robert). Hopefully Murray can work out his best team earlier this season, it seemed to take him until the second Forfar game last season to stumble upon our best team and we dropped a lot of points in the first quarter due to poor team selections. We know that playing the usual defence, McKay, Carrick and Gallagher works pretty well, so it's just finding the best players to fit in around them.

I think Hutton, Currie, Carrick, Gallagher and Thomson are all part-time so we should just fit into the 18 players for one coach thing, although I think Crighton is involved with coaching as well isn’t he? Murray as the only non-playing coach is an issue though, one of the reasons for our poor form at the start of last season seemed to be Murray coaching all the full-time players himself with no one else to help out during the day so hopefully we can get someone else in.

Seems to be with the same agency as Griffin Sabatini so I guess that makes some sense. He doesn't seem to have played anywhere since 2019 and doesn't have a particularly great scoring record, though looking at that video he seems like more of a wide player/attacking midfielder than an out and out striker. We definitely needed another forward player though so good to get one in.

Hard to say really, he only came into the team in mid February so didn’t have too much time to make an impact before the season ended. I thought he looked really good on his debut against Dumbarton, seemed decent on the ball and hard working and took some decent set pieces, but he struggled to make much of an impact in the following games. I’d be surprised if he’s in the initial starting eleven for Alloa but there’s probably enough there to show he can improve and be a decent player at that level.

Our squad numbers run up to 25 at the moment with three gaps so I'm expecting another two or three players in. Even as it stands the squad is probably bigger than what most teams in this league will have, albeit ours is padded out with four or five players from last season's reserves. Much like last season when we had about 35 players including the reserves, I'm not sure whether signing all these reserve players is the best idea when we could have one or two better players for the cost of their wages, though there's definitely a balance needed between Airdrie last season and Stevie Aitken's Dumbarton team.

Yeah I agree with this. Solid striker at this level and good for double figures, especially if Cove are in the same scoring form they were in last year. He was a strange player at Airdrie, ended up with double figures due to a flurry of goals in the meaningless last few games but he was still our best forward that season. I don’t think anyone was too bothered to see him go though, as for all he managed double figures I never really felt he looked composed in front of goal. Missed a few good chances which ultimately cost us with how many home games we lost 1-0 that season.

Bain's a good right back for this level and probably an improvement on Clyde's defence last season. He's pretty versatile, he played on both sides at full back and on the wing for Airdrie but he's primarily a right back who's better going forward but seems to have improved defensively in the few times I've seen him play since leaving Airdrie. He's also good for a great goal every now and then.

Looks like Sabatini and Ritchie have taken 12 and 13, so still potentially three players left if they’re filling out all the numbers. A 25 man squad seems massive at a time when most clubs are running with smaller squads, though I guess even that is much smaller than last season.

Last seasons midfield was generally quite experienced though. Nat Wedderburn’s played in League One and the leagues above before and Kieran Millar had been in this league for five or six years and while not necessarily experienced Kurtis Roberts is 25. Despite that experience the midfield was our main complaint last season, mainly due to a real lack of creativity and ability to control games. I think most fans are excited about the unknown rather than because we think these new signings will be great players. They may well turn out to be rubbish but signing unknown foreign players is always going yo be more interesting than signing players from other League One teams. Ideally we would sign an experienced midfielder who is good on the ball and has the ability to control a game and drive the team forward. Unfortunately there’s not too many players like that at this level and Falkirk and Thistle will always be able to outbid us, let alone teams in the league above. Rather than settle for the same average midfield, the club have gambled on a few unknown players who might be able to improve the team. I’ve got more confidence in the current regime than previous ones given that we’re taking a few gambles while having a mainly settled squad rather than filling the team with young, unproven players.

Even if Robert and Sabatini don’t work out we still won’t be as bad as those teams (hopefully!). We still have the same settled core from last seasons squad and even some of our signings this summer (Currie and O’Reilly) are known quantities. I’d be concerned if we signed a full team of unknown players like your examples but signing a few of them is great fun. Much more exciting than signing Kieran Millar and Nat Wedderburn anyway.

So far this summer we've signed players from Stranraer, Truro City, Hearts, St. Johnstone, Montpellier and SC Dnipro 1. Certainly a much more diverse list than usual...

I'm really enjoying these type of signings. No idea if they're any good but much more interesting than signing someone from another League One team.

Yeah he sounds very much like a replacement for Kieran Millar. I saw Joe McKee mentioned in another thread, I'd be very happy with him as we could really do with having someone who managed double figures for assists last season.

Perhaps not the experienced midfielder we were hoping for but good to get someone in.

Rohan Ferguson would be a very good signing and I’d say an upgrade on Brennan. He’s player a lot of games for his age and I would assume he’s only improved after a year at Linfield. I know he was training with Livingston and I was expecting him to get a full-time deal at a lower end Championship team. He seemed to do quite well working with Neil Parry and then became first choice when we went full-time with a very young squad. He never really had a settled or even competent defence in front of him in his time at Airdrie (we conceded 66 goals in his first full season despite being full-time) and after Parry left he never had any experienced keepers to challenge him which didn’t help. There were definitely times when he made a few mistakes and his confidence was low but overall he was a decent keeper at this level. He wasn’t the most commanding and seemed to struggle with high balls and coming off his line but that might have improved with experience.

He’s from Airdrie isn’t he? I suppose being local helps and we’re probably the only club that would offer him a full-time deal at the moment. While he might not be in the first choice starting 11, going by the squad so far he seems like the first player to come in if there’s an injury in defence or midfield so I imagine he’ll still play plenty of games.

Nice to get a break from playing Forfar on the opening day and hopefully a winnable first game. Two trips to Falkirk and Thistle is tough but we had the best away record in the league last season so hopefully that doesn’t affect us too much.

Yeah not winning the opening game (generally losing it) has become a common feature of our seasons, I think beating Queens's Park in 2016 is the only time we've won our opening league game since we were last in the Championship. Strangely enough in that Championship season we actually won our opening two games and then proceeded to win three of the remaining games! This feels like the first season in a long time where we're carrying over a fairly settled squad from the previous season. Going back to when Bollan was manager, we seemed to lose our better players over the summer and then struggled to replace them until halfway through the next season which led to very slow starts. Since then we've had spells of signing lots of young full-time players in one go, Findlay's glut of mid-table jobbers and then the hybrid last season. The club seems a lot more settled now and I think consistency and having some proven, familiar faces in the squad goes a long way at this level, so hopefully that should help this season.

Pretty much yeah. Five of last season’s reserve team have signed for next season, though one of them was already under contract, with the rest being released. We’ve also signed four other players and I’d imagine there will be two or three more to come. The reserve players will mainly provide depth.

I'd be open to trying a back three again in the closed door or league cup games as we do have good options in defence but we looked much better once we settled on a back four last season. Crighton, Fordyce and Kerr are all good players but they're all players who seem more comfortable on their right foot which doesn't really lend itself a back three. It's good to have these options though, as we saw even in the last game of the season we kept a clean sheet and looked decent defensively with a back four of Fordyce - Crighton - Kerr - MacDonald. Given we tried playing Kerr in midfield a couple of times last season and the end of season highlights video he tweeted described him as a centre back/midfielder, I think we're more likely to see Kerr and McKay in midfield together based on the current squad. As you say though, we definitely still need at least one more midfielder. Hearts game aside, I remember Kerr being pretty poor in the 0-0 home game against Stranraer when we started in midfield but to be fair the whole team struggled that day so it's hard to judge how he would do there long-term. He was really coming onto a game towards the end of last season though so hopefully he continues to improve with experience.

I agree with all of this. It’s really important to have a good balance in the squad and as you say, I think we’re probably an experienced midfielder away from that. I would imagine the manager will be well aware of that given we’ve let Millar and Wedderburn go, though I think we probably need to bring in a slightly different type of player we definitely do need to replace that experience. Only signing players under 30 comes across as a bit too Football Manager but in our case I think it’s probably justified at the moment, providing we’re still bringing the odd experienced player to compliment the younger players. While we clearly struggled under the Wotherspoon era due to a lack of experience and leadership, we also struggled under Stevie Findlay for the opposite reasons. He signed a lot of experienced League One players in Robertson, Millar, Page, McIntosh etc and while they were all decent enough players (Page excluded) with good experience at this level, we really lacked pace and excitement that season. Trying to find a balance between the two is our best way of being successful. While we have some full-time players, Falkirk and Thistle will still have comfortably bigger budgets than us and we won’t be able to sign up the best squad on paper. We still have a decent core with the majority of last seasons defence and attack still there and while we have that experienced core I’d rather see the club gamble on a few players like Thomas Robert than sign up average League One players to pad out the squad.

He’ll be a good signing for League Two. Airdrie fans are quite split on Roberts, some seem to think he was our best player while others weren’t too unhappy to see him go. He was excellent during our winning run in October/November but outside of that I felt he never really got going. He seemed to have fitness issues and rarely played a full 90 minutes, even during his great form he was still subbed in every game (albeit mostly late on). He scored a few goals and was probably the only player in our team who was capable of making good forward runs from midfield. I don’t think we ever saw the best of either of them last season but if you can get Roberts and Ryan then it should be an exciting team to watch.

I thought O’Reilly was quite decent in the few games he played last season but hard to tell how good he is with such a small sample size. Thomson, O’Reilly, Carrick and possibly Robert seem like decent enough options for wide players anyway.

Confirmed that Joshua Burke, Scott Walker and Joseph Moore have signed up for next season. I think that’s now 16 players confirmed: GK - Currie, Hutton DF - MacDonald, Crighton, Fordyce, McCann, Kerr, Burke, Walker MF - Thomson, McKay, Moore FW - Gallagher, Carrick, Roy, Pyott The squad looks pretty much sorted in goals and defence but definitely need a few midfielders in. We could probably still do with another forward to replace Ryan/Smith given that Roy and Pyott are still unproven at this level.