MerryHell

No probs.

If you prefer to email that's fine. My post was a genuine pointer to those saying about the premium rate phone line. Nothing more, nothing less.

For people's information - 0141 579 1971 still works - it's what I use when I'm contacting the club.

This could get messy soon if its not sorted. If its down to paypal, we really should be suspending the CF until the situation is fixed. Is this a new thing, or has it been an issue for a while now? How many people pay with PayPal - I certainly wouldn't welcome a multiple of £5, £10 or £20 coming out my account to make up for any failed transactions, if/when the situation is sorted. As with many things it's down to communication - if the club are expecting me to continue my direct debits, I'd kind of like to know what's going on and when it's likely to be sorted.

Can't disagree with any of that, and it's a lot more measured than some of the criticism on this and other threads. What do people want though? Say AC or BD 'fixed' the catering and centenary fund - the catering is outsourced and would only make more money for SS. The Centenary Fund would be unlikely to pull in 5k more even if it was in a better shape. Both need fixed, but fixing them won't necessarily see a significant financial return for the club. Would just fixing them be enough for people?

I thought that Hearts were breaking forward at one point in the first half. Turned out it was half time and they were heading for the tunnel.

Yeah, I think I understand. Just making sure because you've said it doesn't cost the club anything, but now its described as them 'taking out'. So to be a board member, the club should see at least a 5k return from your appointment. Or you can put in 5k. Either of these is acceptable to you?

Why is it relevant what it would cost us for hospitality, travel etc. (I would provide my own suit as well)? I don't know what your point was in working this figure out.

Okay so you didn't state they were costing us 5k, you said close to 5k. I dont know if they have contributed cash or not - it was just suggested by another poster that they hadn't. Do you know? If not, as I said before, why would we expect them to without shares etc? If they did contribute cash without shares but as some kind of loan, i'd be more worried about that. On what they bring - I don't know and neither do you. The only difference seems to be that I can accept that they must be bringing something, whereas you want to sit and work out how much they are costing the club, with the begrudging acceptance that they might bring their own suit. Listing issues with the club, doesn't mean they don't contribute anything. We don't know who is ultimately responsible for any of the good things that have happened at the club - some of it may well be of their doing.

I'm not asking these things to say you are wrong, i'm just suggesting that none of us know much about the situation and so we are all left to invent one for ourselves. Some of the scenarios are less negative than others.

Okay - so is the only possible acceptable contribution that they can make as a board member a financial one? It's this kind of thing i'm not liking about this and a couple of other threads. We all admit there are issues at the club, but it does nobody any favours to sling mud and invent figures suggesting that board members are costing us 5k a year without showing any benefit to the club. Because we don't know about the inner workings of the club and who does what, doesn't give us carte blanche to invent a narrative that suits our own agenda.

Centenary Fund and Catering are long term issues, and they are needing urgent attention - that's a given. On some of the other things, I do wonder how much of the issues are supplier issues. When we didn't have a home strip for about 3 months at the beginning of last season (remember that?), it wasn't really the clubs fault and realistically we couldn't really do anything to hurry the supplier along - is it impossible that this was the case with the season tickets/machinery this year? Also the DVD - somebody asked days ago, but do we own copyright to the material or would it have been the SFL? Is it possible that the disbanding of the SFL made this easier/cheaper to produce and be more viable? TAG is delayed, but i'd rather they sorted the season ticket situation first before moving onto that. As far as I know, the only date with regard to the prize draw that was given was that you had to join up by a certain date to be included. People claiming that they have missed the deadline or failed to deliver on this and questioning the legality are jumping the gun a bit I think. Also the new directors being criticized for not putting any cash in - are there actually any shares for them to buy? I don't see too many people going into Dragons Den and saying 'we'll give you 0% of the company for £XXXXXX'. Or do we want 'soft loans' etc. from them, because we've seen how successful that is at other clubs?

I'd probably agree with this - my issue is that we are making up 'facts', unless some know more than they are letting on.

Think McNamara might come up against his first managerial setback at United. At Thistle, we've obviously developed a pretty good scouting system that can identify players from the Juniors, Uni football, and the lower Scottish Professional Leagues and they, more often than not turn into gems. I think being new at the management game, he thinks this can be replicated elsewhere, hence his signings of Queens Park players etc. Not everyone can make the step up. I'm pretty sure this is going to apply to Jackie as well.

If that's actually how everything happened (and ignoring the fact that if a DVD and/or TAG launch, it WILL make the club money) then no, nobody could deny any of this.

Would agree with about everything above - its pretty vacuous, but it's not saying anything negative, so a few column inches won't do us any harm. Didn't know Jimmy Craigan was still at Uni!

In the recent tradition of POTY leaving us, it's got to be Lawless.

Yeah - it's pretty poor. Am leaning towards withdrawing my £10. Its the only way I can see them sit up and take notice. Well, not just me withdrawing my £10, but you know what I mean. It is a shame, as many have stated they'd be willing to up their contributions if it was well run and marketed.

I think one of his problems is that he can, and by the looks of it, regularly does.

Does Coopers take any advertising in the programme or any other area? Would be good if some of the businesses that have suddenly decided to publicly support Thistle (and look like they might be seeing an upturn in custom) could find it within themselves to put a bit of the cash back into the club.

This is what I don't get - the BBC had somebody there (John Robertson?) who could have written the match report, or at least checked it for accuracy. Rob Mclean has reportedly been punted from Sportscene because he's freelance and too expensive. Pretty sure most of the 'open-all-mics' team will be freelance as well - could we not get a bit more value for money out of them?

Obviously, we hope that everyone will be able to step up to the plate when called to do so, but if we manage to hold onto our squad until 1st September, I'm pretty sure we've the team to stay in the Premiership. Stevie Lawless actually signing an extension would be the icing on the cake. I still think that Macnamara, Paton and Erskine all left /signed PCAs because at the time they had doubts about our promotion chances. Hopefully as we pick up more points, the players we have now will be more confident we'll stay in the top league and extend their contracts when offered new deals.

It's not really the highlighting of faults I've an issue with, it's the wanting a pound of flesh or over exaggerating the impact of the faults. Highlighting faults can be positive for a business. But that's just the way I see it. People might truly be being inconvenienced by the inability of TAG to get off the ground to date.

I wasn't really meaning that we were victims of our own success - just that being successful has made the board over-stretch themselves and the staff at the club. I mean, is an electronic entry system really needed? I don't imagine it was top of many peoples list of 'improvements' needed at Firhill. I understand that it might be beneficial long term in terms of saving cash and time, and if it's in place and works for Hearts game then we'll all have one less thing to moan about. Then again, we were supposed to have been contacted this week about our season tickets so ... Recruitment is needed, but recruiting the proper people does take time and money, unless you are relying solely on volunteers. I've no idea when Michelle left, but as she hadn't been there for that long anyway, i'm pretty sure she wouldn't have had a long (if any) notice period to serve. It is likely to have been sudden and disruptive. I don't disagree with many of the issues that have been raised about the club, I just think that people get carried away and start exagerating the impact. Summer signings were slow, but it descended into questioning the suitability of Maxi's educational record and family holiday commitments. Now some are questioning whether the club has broken the law because we've been slow to implement the TAG scheme and associated competition. Then there's the unspecified complaint from Dundee United. I don't mean this as a veiled insult, but I think that onethistle have it right as they know the scope of what they are trying to achieve and have the people to help achieve it. Just about everyone believes that onethistle have had a positive impact on the matchday experience, so naturally people say why don't you run the centenary fund etc. Onethistle say no, it's not part of our remit or what we are focusing on. I think that the club board (who are all inexperienced in leading the club to the top division as far as I know) have got caught up with their enthusiasm and just thought we can do everything. We clearly can't, but I do believe that the board have the clubs interests at heart, and despite everything that has happened this summer, I still think that in 9 months time we'll be looking back on this season as a success.

There's a lot of things that could be run better at the club - there's no doubt about that, and i'm sure even those responsible would admit it, but I do think a lot of it is down to being over ambitious. You ask if we hadn't won the league last year would they get away with it - i'd suggest that winning the league last year has caused us to over stretch ourselves and try to push the club onwards. How would you prioritise everything above, because I just dont think we've the staffing to fix everything at once? Even people that agree with your list would have to admit that there are things that they would have put on the list a week or two ago that they wouldnt now. I'm thinking of the complaints about no advertising around the pitch, no shorts sponsor, lack of signings etc. FFS - there was a discussion on the nature of Maxi's degree as if that's relevant to anything.