La Scimmia Rossa

It's time to reach for the official stats again. Isn;t it?

Another Vatavision guy. They seem well connected. Has Rudovic left btw?

Imagine having to earn money to pay your mortgage. Shame on Conrad. Absolutely disgraceful.

To all the Save The Children volunteers. Also to the NS guys with the banner in the second half. We got there!

Agreed re the striker. Doolan should be dropped . For muirhead.

Last bump. 2 more volunteers required. Club have offered free entry, so get your mates along!

Hopefully we may have banner sorted. I believe PT is on the case.

Thanks for this folks i'll be in touch tomorrow. I won't be able to take part because i can't get there for 1.45. However there are now 8 volunteers. Another 4 would be great. Really appreciate all the help.

Thanks for the PMs. I'll be in touch tomorrow.

Bumping this because i've only had two volunteers( thanks to those who did).

Hi everyone. I have had further correspondence from the club. Save the Children are delighted with the collection on Saturday. Given its last minute, they are short of numbers though and are looking for some help. The club are looking for around a dozen volunteers. You would need to be at Firhill 13.45 on Saturday to get into position, with collecting going on until kick off. Ian Maxwell is happy to give all volunteers a ticket to get into the game as a thank you. Can you post on here if you are interested, and PM me your email address? Thanks

Hi everyone. I have had further correspondence from the club. Save the Children are delighted with the collection on Saturday. Given its last minute, they are short of numbers though and are looking for some help. The club are looking for around a dozen volunteers to act as can shakers (ooh err missus). You would need to be at Firhill 13.45 on Saturday to get into position, with collecting going on until kick off. Ian Maxwel is happy to give all volunteers a ticket to get into the game as a thank you. Can you post on here if you are interested, and PM me your email address? Thanks

If people feel that's what they want to do, fair enough. I'd be happy to donate. No reason why we can't support all of the initiatives, since they seem complementary?

Let's get the collection done and maybe make the ticket thing ongoing? We could contact local agencies for that? Some great ideas here...

I haven't done anything and won't be.anyone else? Let me know when it's set up and i'll tweet the details

Excellent. Good work.

Those who have other ideas feel free to pursue them. I focussed on the Save The Children because they'll be geared up to organise and take care of the cash. So i'm happy the club have said yes and responded so quickly. The justgiving page sounds a good idea. I suggested the banner to PT on twitter as something the North Stand might want to do. It would be showing solidarity with other football clubs around Europe. It's more of a political statement i guess. Feeding people is great but unless the politics change, there won't be many to feed since the UK has taken in c 4000 Syrians in 4 years of conflict. However, that's a call for the NS to make.

Just received the following reply from Ian Maxwell "Hi Colin Thanks for the email. As you say, we pride ourselves on being a community club and are more than happy to support such fundraising initiatives. I’ll get in touch with Save the Children and see what needs to be done to organise a can collection for the Dundee game as suggested. We’ll obviously advertise the collection in the lead up to the game when things are confirmed." Thanks for supporting this folks. I'm happy with that. I'll happily contribute towards a banner but i'll leave that to others to organise.

Thanks for the support. Really pleased we are all on the side ( not that i doubted it), it's really important that you email the club tho. Register support.

After reading the statements from Bayern and Celtic today, i sent Ian Maxwell an email. I don't want a political debate on the subject. All i ask, is that if you agree with me, you send an email to Maxie at [email protected] "Ian, i hope you are well. You'll be well aware of the current refugee crisis. You'll probably also have read the statements from Bayern and Celtic this afternoon. Football clubs have the power to shape opinions, but they also have the ability to motivate people to help. Thistle are a community club and you and the board and the fans have done good work in this space. Glasgow has a long and rich history of immigration and also sheltering and assisting those who come here at a time of need. The current first team are represented by players from various countries , some of which had their own terrible tragedies down through the years. I wonder if the club would be willing to support and publicize an official fundraiser at the Dundee game a week on Saturday. Perhaps invite Save the Children to collect before the game since they have a specific campaign, and the club and fans can publicise it ? By allowing a regulated charity to collect, it avoids all the issues that might spring up from a fan -run adhoc collection. It'll carry much more weight if the club are behind it. What do you think? Is it feasible? Regards Colin"

If you look at season 1 of promotion at try to establish core support, it's very difficult. Mainly because the corresponding ICT, County and St Johnstone games aren't comparable-two of them being midweek. It's a very poor sample of 1 but the Ross County match in Jan of Season 1 attracted 3000 Thistle fans( my estimate). My feeling is we had a year one bounce from 2500 "core" in season 1. They dwindled by about 400 or so in season 2 leaving us a couple of hundred up on core support but down overall. If we have an ok season this year, i'd expect that to remain steady and it might even grow slightly. A guesstimate is we are "marketing" to 200-300 floating fans. Tops. All guesswork and conjecture but at least with some thought?

Well that's an interesting interpretation. :lol: . No need for the oracle chat. Entitled to make a post. Just like you. I at least attempted to do some sort of analysis. Do you disagree with the numbers i've posted?

Ian Jardine

Difficult to disagree with any of what MP is saying there. Even assuming ,you ignore the outside competition (Warriors, Rocks, Clan) , being a football fan has completely changed over the last 10 years. There are games on every night of the week and you don't even need a TV or a sky sports subscription to watch them now. A 90 quid Tesco Hudl tablet suffices.in fact man are happy watching tweets come in, rather than a live game. Bizarrely i noticed that betting was available on last night's U20 match( i don't bet). On my twitter feed, some guy IN CHINA went berzerk when Thistle scored. He had been following the game on line via @thistletweet. So it's for these reasons we should be glad that the core 2500 want to spend a tenner extra to watch Aberdeen than Cowdenbeath and have stayed with the club for the last three seasons. They have many, many, reasons to chose to do other things. That choice isn't driven by what the club do or don't do(unless they piss fans off), it's driven by life changing events as MP points out : Mortgage, Spouse/partner/kids. David Beattie is absolutely spot on when he says the whole of football needs to work together to solve this problem. Maybe the club could do more but it's limited in what it can do. I've said it numerous times on here. You could give away 10,000 free tickets every week and by the end of the season, you'd be barely above where we are now. In some people's eyes, thats defeatist and negative. Maybe it is. Or maybe they live in a wee Thistle type bubble ? We should be focussing on keeping the fans we have and improving facilities and experience for the customers who do turn up. Not the ones who have turned their back(for valid reasons).

Yup. And we've lost fans since the 50's 60's and 70's. I'm not disagreeing with that. I think they are gone now. For various reasons. I'm looking at "data" from the last 3-4-5 years.