The Big Queen's Park FC Thread

[The Moonster]

14 hours ago, Arachnophile said:

"The arrangement includes the club’s home matches up to Scotland’s UEFA Nations League fixture at home to Poland on September 5 and the SPFL Board has approved Rangers playing such matches away from their own Registered Ground."

The great unanswered question is what happens if Ibrox is not ready at the start of September

My brother was called out to an emergency job in Glasgow last week as the current on site personnel were making a royal c**t of it. He says there is next to no chance that football games could be played at this venue in September, with Christmas being a more accurate end date. This is going to get very ugly I think, if it isn't ugly enough already.

Edit - also some further info which might explain why QP are out on the arse here...the SFA have skin in the upgrade of Ibrox, it helps them with bids for future tournaments/finals and as such had requested that Rangers use certain suppliers. These suppliers have been a big reason for the delays (as well as incompetence) so I reckon the SFA will be more obliging to Rangers in that regard. That and the fact they're almost always more obliging to those c***s. 

Edited July 16 by The Moonster

[Mr.Blue]

54 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

Why?

You're the one with a stadium that's usable that's requesting to play at someone else's ground. Rangers need to use a different ground than Ibrox and the SFA are under no obligation to help anybody. I genuinely can't think of any other club who actively chooses to not use their own stadium season after season?

You're not "rolling over", you're just in the weakest position. Feels like if you start acting the c**t then Hampden goes as an option and you either use Lesser or return to Stenhousemuir. 

Yeah That's better put than me saying 'rolling over.'

[Spider1975]

46 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

Why?

Because unlike you I can think past the last year and I'm not on someone else's forum self gratification.

The power play between Haughey and the SFA over the whole Hampden sale and the 'ahem' development of Lesser has gotten QP into this state of affairs and when I state QP I am differentiating between the entity of which a massive part is the support and the very small management structure (committee) which seems to view itself as something separate, above and aloof of the club.

Feel free to read a bit more of the forum.  If our stadium is useable then there should be no reason why it isn't used for all of QP's activities, the women's team and youth teams included, but it's not - instead used for Celtic U-18's European forays and for SMNT training.  Nobody knows exactly what the deal is between the SFA and Haughey/QP but I'd be highly doubtful that we have full freedom to do what we want with Lesser and the quid pro quo of that will be the use of Hampden for QP Men's.  

 

[RandomGuy.]

7 minutes ago, Spider1975 said:

 

If our stadium is useable then there should be no reason why it isn't used for all of QP's activities, the women's team and youth teams included.

Exactly, and one day that simple fact will come home to roost, so your club just now will be licking as many arseholes as possible to keep borrowing other people's grounds.

Lesser is technically a useable stadium in the Championship and it's your fortune that, for now, other clubs aren't complaining you get the benefit of using a larger stadium with better facilities every fortnight. Promotion might kill your club as top flight sides, particularly those at the bottom, are bitter clubs who won't be happy with that.

I'd suggest Queens fans actually do something to get Lesser sorted rather than just mewling about how unfair it is they aren't getting to borrow a stadium when they want to. The idea you can do nothing to change things is simply wrong.

[pmonigatti]

9 hours ago, spiders4ever said:

Granted that the upgrading of Lesser has been an absolute farce but does anyone want the Livi game to take place on the Saturday given what will be happening at Hampden at the same time.

To date the SFA doesn't appear to have gone against the agreement with QP. They have simply allowed Sevco to play at Hampden when we weren't going to.  Of course the shit may really hit the fan if Sevco get an extension beyond the beginning of September. 

With regard to the rebuild fiasco don't members need to take some responsibility.  They voted for the committee and the committee ought to have had oversight of the whole project. It seems to me that there was a serious failure of governance at the very least.

I’m not personally that interested in apportioning blame. What I am more interested in is a solution and a plan to get the club into a place where it can comfortably play its home games in a nice small stadium fit for purpose for the level its playing at. 
i’d like to see the supporters association take the lead in trying to move this to the top of the agenda. If the committee has relied on antipathy towards them in order to operate then the only way it’ll change that is to apply pressure on them.

it’s quite obvious that the club will only do the absolute minimum when it comes to communication, the only way to change that is to change their mindset.

[Zanetti]

15 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

Promotion might kill your club as top flight sides, particularly those at the bottom, are bitter clubs who won't be happy with that.

I'm not disputing that some people might not be happy, but out of curiosity what are you suggesting they could actually do about it? We already had an agreement to play there last season had we gone up the year before so it doesn't seem like the SFA themselves mind.

[williebraveheart]

1 hour ago, Spider1975 said:

I'm maybe in the minority here thinking that offering Savoury a new contract was morally at least the right thing to do?  

Personally I have far more issue with offering Stuart McKinstry a contract, someone imho who's reputation and talk far outweighed any deliverance on the pitch; he's presumably on a wage with us yet hasn't appeared on a team-sheet and I'm guessing won't any time soon.  All transfer talk has seemingly gone quiet.  Anyone with any further insight?

McKinstry's contract expired at the end of last season. He is no longer on our books. He has been offered a new contract which, to date, he has not accepted. Let's hope it stays that way.

[Mission]

I sent an email to the club asking for confirmation that we will play all our games at either Hampden or Lesser ( City ) this season. I did this as I intended to ask for a refund for my season ticket if we have to move. The club president responded quickly to confirm we will play our games at these two grounds this season.

I'm not criticising comments on this forum as I agree the communication is not great at times but, It's not up to the club to respond to endless P&B speculation. I suppose they can only communicate if something has changed and according to the club president, there is no change. We remain in the South side with a mix of two grounds and possible date changes.

No shouting at me, please. I rarely post and this was to give you some information.

[RandomGuy.]

8 minutes ago, Zanetti said:

I'm not disputing that some people might not be happy, but out of curiosity what are you suggesting they could actually do about it? We already had an agreement to play there last season had we gone up the year before so it doesn't seem like the SFA themselves mind.

They've banned unenforced ground sharing in the past.

If you start challenging regularly for promotion and/or get promoted, then I'm 100% certain sides you're challenging, who see you bringing in larger crowds will moan about it similar to how they moaned about plastic pitches helping sides earn money they couldn't.

[Zanetti]

34 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

They've banned unenforced ground sharing in the past.

If you start challenging regularly for promotion and/or get promoted, then I'm 100% certain sides you're challenging, who see you bringing in larger crowds will moan about it similar to how they moaned about plastic pitches helping sides earn money they couldn't.

We didn't share Hampden with anyone last season, and likely won't again once Rangers sort out Ibrox (and that's been forced, since it was already our registered home venue for the season). I think the only potential workaround would be to ban playing at a stadium not owned by your club, which would be a bit problematic given that applies to almost half of the Championship.

Edit to add: I'm not for one second justifying the mess we're in, to be clear. It's not viable to go on like this year after year, without knowing where we'll be playing our home games, and I've repeated that many times. We either need a plan to sort out Lesser, or a watertight, long term agreement to use Hampden; just highlighting that I don't think the second option would cause issues if we were ever to go up.

Edited July 16 by Zanetti

[craigkillie]

2 hours ago, Todd_is_God said:

I think you need to include Police Scotland as well here - there's no way they let Rangers v Motherwell be moved to a Friday night.

Rangers have played on Friday nights in the past without issue. They can't play on the Friday this time because they'll have a European game that midweek and it might be on the Wednesday.

[Arachnophile]

4 minutes ago, craigkillie said:

Rangers have played on Friday nights in the past without issue. They can't play on the Friday this time because they'll have a European game that midweek and it might be on the Wednesday.

Well, they certainly haven't played on Friday nights in the past year & I suspect the Polis would rather deal with their fans on a Saturday afternoon rather than a Friday night when they have plenty of other drunken idiots to deal with already.

[TheHitman]

40 minutes ago, Mission said:

I sent an email to the club asking for confirmation that we will play all our games at either Hampden or Lesser ( City ) this season. I did this as I intended to ask for a refund for my season ticket if we have to move. The club president responded quickly to confirm we will play our games at these two grounds this season.

I'm not criticising comments on this forum as I agree the communication is not great at times but, It's not up to the club to respond to endless P&B speculation. I suppose they can only communicate if something has changed and according to the club president, there is no change. We remain in the South side with a mix of two grounds and possible date changes.

No shouting at me, please. I rarely post and this was to give you some information.

Thanks for sharing this information. 
 

My only comment would be, that there would not be half as much P&B speculation, if, the club prioritised effective communication to ‘their’ fan base. 
 

Like for example, as you’ve said, the president has confirmed we are at Hampden or lesser this season. This would be a really helpful statement for the club to put out right about now, given the enormous amount of ambiguity that has come from the Rangers deal with Hampden. 
 

My feeling is that the club need to realise that official comms, even if to re-confirm something, would go a long long way with ‘their’ fan base. 

[Spidersmad]

1 hour ago, Anonymous Spider said:

That's not the issue. It’s the lack of information and engagement and then an update that’s so embarrassingly brief and lacking in any sort of contrition that it alienates supporters (of multiple clubs) and we’re back talking about EGM’s.

The exact same thing happened after we eliminated ourselves from the Scottish Cup due to an "administrative oversight" up at Inverness. The subsequent "statement" by the then club president was the briefest possible, expressed no regret and contained no apology. Leeann Dempster did step in with a better statement and the travelling supporters were reimbursed. These terse presidential messages to the fans show a lack of empathy and an absence of basic good manners. I'm still hoping that a more apologetic statement about the date change will be issued although it would be somewhat belated now.

[Gall09]

Seems to be an implication from some that QP fans don’t put the blame for the stadium fiasco at the QP committee/Haughey’s door. The whole thing is a clusterfuck of mismanagement, we all realise that. We are still incredibly amateur off the pitch. Embarrassingly so. 

[Skyline Drifter]

20 minutes ago, Arachnophile said:

Well, they certainly haven't played on Friday nights in the past year & I suspect the Polis would rather deal with their fans on a Saturday afternoon rather than a Friday night when they have plenty of other drunken idiots to deal with already.

Why?

I'd have thought it would be the other way round to be honest. I'd imagine they'd much rather deal with them on a Friday night than a Saturday afternoon. Drinking time is severely limited on a Friday night because the vast majority will have been at work all day or at least part of it and the pubs aren't open that long after the game. Saturday afternoon would see more pre-match drinking and certainly more post match drinking.

I'd be genuinely shocked if Police Scotland didn't much prefer playing a Rangers game on a Friday night to doing so on a Saturday afternoon.

[Grumpy Soo-sider]

Plans seem to still exist on the Glasgow City Council website for a 486 capacity south stand (Letherby Drive end). The current east stand is shown as having a capacity of 959 and with the ivory tower having 40 seats that would give us a capacity of around 1,500. Still not really big enough but enough to be going on with.

(see - https://publicaccess.glasgow.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=documents&keyVal=R3W6GEEXIL300)

There's a huge amount of wasted space on the west side of the ground and a fair amount of space at the north (Somerville Drive) end. The original (scrapped) plans for the West side of the ground had provision for 914 seats but this was abandoned for something "bigger and better" (https://queensparkfc.co.uk/bigger-and-better-for-lesser-hampden/)

 

[TheHitman]

21 minutes ago, Grumpy Soo-sider said:

Plans seem to still exist on the Glasgow City Council website for a 486 capacity south stand (Letherby Drive end). The current east stand is shown as having a capacity of 959 and with the ivory tower having 40 seats that would give us a capacity of around 1,500. Still not really big enough but enough to be going on with.

(see - https://publicaccess.glasgow.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=documents&keyVal=R3W6GEEXIL300)

There's a huge amount of wasted space on the west side of the ground and a fair amount of space at the north (Somerville Drive) end. The original (scrapped) plans for the West side of the ground had provision for 914 seats but this was abandoned for something "bigger and better" (https://queensparkfc.co.uk/bigger-and-better-for-lesser-hampden/)

 

I feel a new club motto coming on… does anyone know the Latin for ‘Bigger and Better’ ..?

[Cyclops van Gogh 1867]

Seems like this hasn't already been done on here, so, I'd like to thank Ruari Paton for his phenomenal contribution last season and wish him all the very best at Port Vale.

As for tonight's game at Easter Road

'mon the Spiders 

[starshot131]

3 minutes ago, TheHitman said:

I feel a new club motto coming on… does anyone know the Latin for ‘Bigger and Better’ ..?

A vague memory suggests it's "plus magnum et bonum"
I feel like we might need to rework that given I don't trust fans of other teams to treat "bonum" with respect