John Blutarsky

beyond the majority of sfl div 1 clubs, i would venture. on the one hand, leagues 1 and 2 and english non-league sides will increasingly be the destination for good and half-decent scottish talent. on the other, a steady job or career will be a far more attractive option to a 20/22-year old with modest talent than the prospect of 15 years of full-time football at £200 - 300 a week.

up there with scottish football.

if my memory serves me right ian mccall did very little to impress in his, admittedly short time at firhill as a player.

absolutely yes. their job is obtain & maintain listener ratings. the method is to aim at the lowest common demoninator. no knowledge of football is required. if you respond by expressing a positive or negative emotion to their like, you let them exert their horrible slimy influence over you. better to be dispassionate as far as the popular media is concerned. kick back and watch the world cup with the sounds aff, england games included, and enjoy it for what it is. there's tons of stuff on the web that's free of jingoism and ex-pro's and hacks with single figure IQ's, where you can get a balanced view and analysis of the game.

at the uefa final at hampden a couple of years back, espanyol and sevilla fans were side by side in the section i was in. good game, great atmosphere and minimum polis presence. there's no historic rivalry or bad feelings between these teams and it might have been different if it was, say, betis and sevilla. i can't figure why policing at firhill couldn't be organised on a similar basis. airdrie and dundee, yes police presence required but when ross bring 63.5 docile supporters to firhill i can't help thinking that the costs to the club of funding polis overtime is uneccessary.

That decision. Good times at firhill.

GPT, since all the major wine producing countries are represented in SA, will there be a clever wine theme at the monkey for the duration of the tournament to reflect this?

think the transport museum closed a few weeks back, to allow them time to transfer the exhibits to the new transport museum, which opens in a year or possibly two. obv, there's the kelvingrove art gallery and museum, which can be followed with an afternoon of drinking cheap alcohol on cider hill in the park and rounded off with a game of crazy bowls on the rinks near the gallery. the hunterian at the yooni is class and the botanics is always a delight to visit. burrell collection, pollok house and pollok park is a top day out. they have a collection of hairy cattle in a field just for the towrists. providing you can get to balmaha, the mail boat is a superb way to see loch lomond without encountering the towrist tat. it's only five english pounds, a lot less than the crowded towrist boats that leave from balloch. if you go to inverness, you can always visit tescos, which is between tescos and er.... tescos.

it certainly was. i watched about ten minutes of one team lumping it up the park, followed by 20 blokes moving in the general direction of the ball, followed by the other team lumping it back up the park, the same twenty blokes changing direction. almost complete inability to complete a pass. dreadful, but sadly accurate advert for the scottsih game.

'Lucifer's dreambox' - Bill Hicks.

not necessarily a manager with a better record, but they might feel that they are well placed to tempt team adams away from ross at this point in time. their record of overachievement these past couple of seasons isn't too shabby.

Good analysis on ZM, for those like me that don't have any leanings towards or away from particular EPL sides. http://www.zonalmarking.net/2010/05/10/chelsea-premiership-champions-2009-10/

with 2 clubs (bairns, dundee)having significantly bigger budget, a couple (binos and b brasil/brechin) having a significantly smaller budget and the other five clubs within a mid range, next years league will probably go much the same as this years. unless someone gets investment or unearths a few players or a manager of oustanding talent, it's unlikely that anyone will punch above their weight. we will be looking at more or less the same league position and points average next season.

if they reckon relegation is going to cost them £1.5 - £2 millions, they would have known this when they appointed a manager with zero experience. strange appointment.

it's neither a case of being depressed nor worried. it's simply a fact that the rule is leagues will generally run from the top team being the one with the highest budget to the team that's relegated having the lowest. sure, there are exceptions, like our double relegation year or last year when we punched above our weight. if mccall can unearth another buchnanan, harkins and twaddle then we could punch above our weight. if not, we will probably finish about sixth.

capello doesn't think this, which will work for them.

it's a similar formula to greece that england has adopted, using a disciplinarian foreign coach who gets the best out of a fairly ordinary group of players. the difference is that england do have a few top line individuals. they've got to fancy their chances against some of the teams above them in the fifa rankings - argentina (maradona's squad and team selects), spain (if iniesta, villa, torres and senna don't recover in time), weak italy and germany sides and portugal.

recently finished 'Why England Lose: and Other Curious Phenomena Explained' by simon kuper and stefan szymanski. changed the way i look at certain aspects of the game. a refreshing view of football, very different from the hackneyed, cliched perspective of the mainstream media. the antithesis of young, trainer et al.

'customers who viewed this, also viewed'... a box set of su pollard photo's and a guitar usb cable. wtf? hilarious!

in hamilton's case, it's good for the game, yes. the difference seems to be that livi funded a youth setup using money that they didn't have/wasn't theirs. little sympathy with livi missing out on a windfall as they're reaping what they sowed.