Les Cabbage

I know it’s 3 weeks since the last one but for some reason this gives me the absolute fucking fear. And we all know what’ll be the first to go if she does decide to scale anything back.

Hopefully we have as strong a referee for this one as we did for the last time the two clubs met. Craig Napier was wise and didn’t fall for Alan Forrest’s futile efforts to win a penalty for Livingston in the 2nd half and was correct to show him a yellow card. Livingston may be bottom of the Premiership however they are top in the fouls conceded league which is no surprise to me, I’ll be unsurprised if their hatchet men decide to try and kick the living daylights out of Martin Boyle as they have in previous encounters. Not sure if Kevin Nisbet will be back from his bout of covid but we should hopefully have a couple of new faces in, hopefully we see Hanlon and Newell come back in. Just don’t play Alex Gogic for the love of f**k.

Zander Clark being in the squad after his fifa pro clubs attempt at saving Pawletts shot today would be laughable. Would happily have Kerr over Gallagher but tbh hope not just for the seethe, doesn’t really matter who our 5th choice centre half is tbh.

Deserved result, only ourselves to blame and when I say ourselves I mean Alex Gogic. The guy is absolute guff, we’ve conceded 4 league goals this season and he’s been to blame for 3 of them. I suppose the other fingers you can point are at Graeme Mathie, Jack Ross and Ron Gordon, this humming and hawing over trying to bring in players in time for the season starting, cost us in Europe and cost us today, yes we had injuries but with any foresight we wouldn’t have to play the likes of McGregor and Gogic and we’d still be in Europe and on 9 points. Dundee were good though, expect them to stay up, a good one for the neutral in fairness.

County for me, predicted Dundee 11th early on but Livi could be down there, although they started last season just as miserably and they turned it around so I’m not writing them off yet.

Kevin Nisbet has covid, James Scott to go straight into the team up front I’m hearing.

I know we drew the actual leg in question but the result was an overall win. When we went over to Greece to play Asteras Tripolis we had a 3-2 lead and the away goals rule wasn’t a thing. The first leg we were 2-0 down at a packed Easter Road at half time and we battled back and won 3-2 where the crowd totally drove us on and that last minute winner was just utter chaos. I travelled over to Greece for the away leg after previously being in the Faroe Islands 2 weeks prior for our match in the round before with absolutely 0 optimism, I was convinced we would lose 2 or 3-0 and lose an early goal and them to just be a lot better than us, I think everybody did to be fair. Our taxi driver was a Panathanaikos fan, telling us we had no chance. The game pretty much followed that trend, they were allover us but in the first half we broke up the park and John McGinn (he played for Hibs btw) absolutely hammered it low past their keeper. Early second half they went down to 10 but it didn’t stop them absolutely battering us again, they levelled it and a 2nd would have taken them through on away goals and some of the saves Adam Bogdan made were unbelievable, a really underrated Hibs keeper like. Went through 4-3 on aggregate so it counts imo.

Squad hasn’t even been picked yet and already St Johnstone fans are raging at their lack of picks

Wee stab at the squad, not expecting many shocks, maybe we’ll see a few new faces if we get drop outs though, Doig in for Robertson seems fairly pragmatic if he’s unavailable. McLaughlin, Gordon, Kelly Patterson, O’Donnell, Doig, Taylor, Tierney, Hanley, Hendry, Cooper, McKenna McTominay, Gilmour, McGregor, McGinn, McLean, Turnbull, Armstrong, Christie, Fraser, Forrest Adams, Dykes, McBurnie, Nisbet That gives us 24, we may take a couple of other players as it’s a triple header, Fleck and Gallagher the likely candidates, although Lewis Ferguson wouldn’t shock or upset me.

Honestly couldn’t give a toss if it was his agent trying to grab an extra few hundred quid a week, guy will probably be the difference between 3rd and 4th and is the best non-Old Firm player in the league, longer he stays the better.

GK - Ofir Marciano - Best keeper of my lifetime, Matt Macey couldn’t lace his boots. RB - Matt Doherty - f**k me, I hate having to put him in here but an embarrassingly bad loan spell with us preceded his rise to the upper echelons of English football. CB - Sol Bamba - Still doing it at a decent level down south, beat off cancer aswell, some fucking boi. CB - Paul Hanlon - A pretty boring choice, pips Porteous on the basis of having been more established but usually a steady hand. LB - Josh Doig - Another boring current XI pick but this guy has it in spades and won’t be with us for long. CM - John McGinn - nothing needed. CM - Greg Docherty - An absolute baller, wonder what life would have been like if we saw him playing in a 2 with McGinn, now one of Hull City’s best players. RW - Martin Boyle - hardly anything needed here too, absolute baller, best footballer in the league outwith the old firm. AM - Ryan Gauld - hardly kicked a ball for us, injury didn’t help but even outwith that he wasn’t great, sounds like he had a brilliant season last year and he’s off earning the big bucks now. LW - Abdellah Zoubir - who? People might remember again on Thursday when he plays for Qarabag against Aberdeen. Played a few games for us on loan the year we went down, showed in flashes he was a baller but was very young and probably didn’t have the bottle for it at the time, 20 goals in 3 seasons for Qarabag and plenty in Europe, clearly a player, may knock Aberdeen out single handedly on Thursday. ST - Kevin Nisbet - not really much competition, considered Steven Fletcher as he’s still kicking about but Nisbet definitely edges it on form. & if it’s former players only Hanlon, Nisbet, Boyle and Doig for Ambrose, Fletcher, Daryl Horgan and…..…..we really haven’t had many LBs…..go for Miquel Nelom, playing in the Eredivise, signed him from Feyenoord, couldn’t get in ahead of Stevenson so he left.

Chat seems to be that the release clause applies only for foreign clubs. Probably was inserted to stop Lennon taking him to Celtic for pennies and sticking him on the bench tbf. Got to respect the absolute patter of that offer tbf, more teams should do it and just noise eachother up. Hope we return with £1m + Lewis Ferguson.

Cheers troops. Just seen Dundee we’re charging £26 for home fans so suspect we’ll be the same, that’ll be me watching it on my backside in my flat instead. Fair doos if it was a Saturday and we got a day out in Bonnie Dundee but canny justify that for a boring Sunday pish kick off time.

12pm kick off on a Sunday is guff, gonna drive up to this assuming there’s an away allocation, best places to park?

Honestly have loads of time for it, the folk around me were less forgiving but I would much prefer having a bit of a laugh with the crowd than being a fucking robot. I might have been a bit less relaxed if we were 1-0 down rather than 1-0 up mind you.

Bobby Madden making that decision then running up the touching and grinning at the Hibs fans giving him pelters thus resulting in even more pelters. You have to respect the hustle.

Tickets selling well for this it would appear, grabbed 5 last night, buzzing for a proper day out at Hampden again. Last time I went was the Russia 2-1 game (with the exception of a late 2019 Hibs hammering from Celtic).

Struggling to find value in anyone for this Saturday, Falkirk at 1.95 the only thing looking moderately appealing. Dundee Utd perhaps but I still don’t trust them despite last week, especially with Shankland away and it looking like McNulty is his replacement.

Remember folk were saying McGregor was better than Porteous and we’d have won the cup if he had played Matt Macey is absolutely shite anaw, Ross Laidlaw but taller.

Decided to make my way to Links Park to take in the Montrose game on Saturday with a few pals, something different and ticked off another ground, was a great day out. Buoyed by about 8 pints we went into a bar in Montrose before jumping on a train and the track and trace was done via book, my mate signed first and I noticed he had signed in as Gary Locke, I decided to trump him and signed in as Bert & Ernie and left the old “Your Call with Jim Traynor” phone number as my contact number. Needless to say the lassie went apeshit about 10 mins later and chucked us out. Would do again.

I wouldn’t hold your breath on an okay from Edinburgh Council like, fingers crossed though.

Why are you comparing him to Gogic ? I couldn't think of two more different style of players to be honest. He had great games and poor games for us, most of the great games came at this time last season too coincidentally. Kyle has always shown flashes that make you think there us a player there then another injury hits. Possibly because he’s a midfielder that sits deep, he was marketed to us basically as someone to provide competition with Gogic but I think it’ll be more that he just plays ahead of him. Although if others are saying above he has issues seeing out contracts we may regret only giving him two years. Magennis pretty much looked shite until this season but he’s really stepped it up, hopefully he stays fit.

Got Man of the Match tonight, really really impressed, before tonight had only played off the bench at Motherwell (where he impressed) and away against the Andorran farmers on the worst quality stream I’ve ever seen so f**k knows how he played that night. But he looks a proper player, some really good touches, a real real upgrade on Gogic, a bit of McGeouch about him but a better tackler and more direct, hardly put a foot wrong tonight and drove us forward, a lot of nice touches, fully expect him to be playing every week this season based on what I’ve seen so far. Kyle Magennis is also starting to look like there’s a real player there too which is nice to see, he was good tonight aswell.

That was frustrating as f**k, the pessimist in me feels like that was our chance and it reeks of Dnipro/Molde where we battered them at home without getting the win and it’ll be a different game over there. We pretty much battered them both halves really, Doyle-Hayes rightly got the man of the match, like others have said, a lot of McGeouch energy about him, probably a bit more direct too and Kyle Magennis is a different player this season and it’s lovely to see that we didn’t just blow £175k or whatever for no reason. Will need to see them again but Nisbet and Mackay should have scored and possibly should have been a penalty on Boyle? Based on the 90 we’re the better side but we all know it doesn’t work like that in Europe and I don’t fancy us over there, but a good performance from us at least.