Armand2

Great news about Dumbuya. Pleasantly surprised at the length of the deal. Been very impressed with his performances so far. Hopefully an extension for Dools is announced before Christmas. That would be tremendous. I wouldn't have thought Booth would be too hard to deal with so would be keen to get him tied down for another season. Very steady performer. EDIT: not to pee on the parade here but I'd be surprised if there isn't a get-out clause if we were to be relegated.

ATS, Tommy Stewart, Willie Kinniburgh, Shaun Fraser, King Dools.

There are two absolute spanners who sometimes sit in front of me at Firhill who huff and puff whenever Dools touches the ball. What is even more infuriating is that they sometimes have two youngsters with them who are being "educated" in football by two complete and utter melons, and mirror their bizarre discontent at the best goalscorer in recent Jags history. Absolute fuds. Anyway, long live King Dools. Get a new contract in front of him before Christmas. There's not many strikers at our level who guarantee you double figures every season - and that's despite being excluded at the expense of patently inferior players for spells.

I asked a Killie fan about this in the summer amidst their gratuitous offering of lengthy deals to anyone who had set foot in Ibrox. Apparently, it's a tactic that Michael Johnson has used for many years - long term contracts which are heavily weighted with various release clauses should the player not play a certain number of games, the team gets relegated, goes into financial oblivion, etc.

Maybe we should also play Cerny on the left-wing.

ET article on King Dools. Aye, one is great and the other is rank - add tact to Dools' list of qualities. Without this descending into fanboy adulation, Doolan should be club captain without any shadow of doubt. He's our longest serving player (Scully aside, I believe), a model professional, never complains when he's left out of the side at the expense of patently inferior players, is the best goalscorer in recent history and as Derby Jag said above, is a great ambassador who loves playing for Thistle.

Always disappoints me that Sid is thought of in similar terms to McNamara. I loved Sid although I know he wasn't everyone's cup of tea and suspect he's played an equally (if not greater) role in the improvement of a number of players, both at Firhill and Tannadice. Will be interesting to see how they get on at York. I'm not sure whether many folk would have tipped a Derek Adams managed team featuring such talents as Gregg Wylde and Jake Jervis to be five points clear of that league at this stage.

Cerny came up for a chat in the AR Lounge before the game yesterday. Hoping to be back after the international break - so next week could be the last game without him.

Not much else to say other than pretty disgusted with the gutless second half performance which was on par with the Ross County shambles last season and the continued despicable treatment of the best goalscorer in recent history at the expense of a completely inferior player in every sense. Players have a lot to answer for after today's performance and so does the manager. I love Archie; but if his treatment of Doolan forces him out the door at the end of the season, I'd find it very difficult to forgive him. To bring on a defender, like for like, when being gubbed at home and to maintain a one striker formation is utter lunacy. Very unhappy with that today. Too many players went into their shell when the second goal went in and that's unforgivable.

You're claiming that they don't have comparable records despite the only barometer of any importance being almost identical.

Last time I looked, you got 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw and bugger all for a defeat irrespective of the opposition.

Euro 2012 qualifying - played 8, 11 points. Euro 2016 Qualifying - played 10, 15 points. Subtracting points on a pro-rata basis for the extra fixtures, I'd say they are pretty comparable records.

Agreed. Let's not forget Lithuania are in the group too, a team who we have often struggled to beat away from home.

If I was advising Strachan, I would tell him to leave. There remains a perception that he's done a good job* despite having a record comparable to Levein. He'll be able to get himself a decent Championship gig in England after doing punditry for BBC/ITV at the Euros. In my opinion, the Scotland job isn't seen as the pinnacle of management like managing your country should be; it's seen as an opportunity to get yourself back in the shop window. Hence, I fully expect someone like Paul Lambert to get the job next. *For what it's worth, I think he's done a decent enough job in reinvigorating the national team but isn't without his flaws and certainly isn't the messianic figure some Scotland fans would have had one believe.

Ooo-err.

Perhaps more folk may agree with my assertion that he's a muppet now.

I was slightly critical of the way that the supporters were kept in the dark over the McMillan situation but the club have acted in an exemplary manner, as far as I can see now. I grew to really like McMillan as a player but also recall questioning some unexplained absences from match-day squads throughout his time with us, especially when he first signed. From the UKAD document that was floating about yesterday, it would appear that the club had received allegations of McMillan's social activities prior to his positive test. I rather think that we are continuing to protect a player, who sees fit to slander us despite offering to support him beyond the call of duty, by not disclosing any details of what might have happened previously.

The spiked drink story is one of the most laughable excuses I've ever heard. Even more laughable is the suggestion that the guy who McMillan is despicably trying to blame for the whole incident was "pouring cocaine into his own drink". LOL WUT.

Just to clarify, I don't consider Balatoni a muppet because he signed for Killie; as RM said above, a man needs to earn. He's a muppet because he allowed himself to believe that he was better than he was (which is hardly the greatest crime of the century) and expressed ambition to travel and play abroad...and then proceeded to go as far as Bradford before hooring himself out to teams around our level and below. Balatoni left of his own accord to better himself and has ended up on a short-term contract at a club no better than the one he left; a club who would have happily kept him on, don't forget. That's why he's a muppet.

For a guy who claimed to be keen on travelling to only go as far as Bradford for a trial, he's a f*cking muppet in my book irrelevant of his agent's obvious incompetence.

As Churchill said, never let a crisis go to waste. Good idea and could be a decent PR opportunity.

Chris Jack getting it completely wrong (again) would be less so.

I will always defend Archie and the team from some of the moronic - and that's what a lot of the post-Hearts stuff was despite the questioning by others of describing it as such - criticism that's been angled at them, not only this season so far but in years gone by. However, my defence of the manager from unwarranted abuse doesn't mean that I agree with his decisions unconditionally. Archie has a tough, tough job; anyone who expected this season to be anything but a dogfight wasn't living in the real world. By most accounts, we're running on a smaller budget than previous seasons, we've lost a number of vitally important players who helped to keep us away from danger last year whilst the teams who we expect to compete with have managed to invest in their squads. If Archie manages to keep us up this season, it will surpass anything that the club has achieved during my time as a supporter. The main criticism of Archie's management is his tactical inflexibility. We've had a number of pre-seasons to work on alternative systems yet only appear capable of playing 4-2-3-1. I know Archie is very keen on the whole club philosophy thing, having every age group playing the same formation, but I don't believe we have the personnel to play this system in the first team any more. It was utterly reliant on the quality of our full-backs - McNamara built this system on Sinclair and O'Donnell's athleticism and ability to overload and overlap on the flanks. We struggled on without Sinclair, replacing his attacking qualities with the more conservative but defensively superior McMillan until Booth arrived who is similar in some respects (let's just forget about Carroll and Keenan). But O'Donnell is as close to irreplaceable as can be; that flamboyance and energy from right-back was a massive feature of our play. He had the pace to recover so could sit higher up the pitch, was always available as an outball, always on the move to overlap, always a problem for the opposition to consider. To replace that, we need to get bloody lucky and happen across another O'Donnell; otherwise we need to compromise. To date, we've done the latter; but if we are to persist with Miller whose defensive qualities I value, the system has to change. I think Miller is a standard, off-the-shelf full-back in a 4-4-2; his days as a wing-back are gone, I reckon, and you start to diminish his defensive skills by placing him further up the pitch. Someone else made a decent point about missing Balatoni’s ability to bring the ball out of defence. Conrad wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination but the way we play(ed) was ingrained. You would expect that when fit, Frans and Seaborne will form our first choice defensive pairing which is another nail in the 4-2-3-1 coffin as neither use the ball well enough to form the base of that system. We’re also hamstrung by our attempts to shoehorn three central midfielders into the two available positions in this formation. Bannigan, Welsh and Osman all have their uses but if all three play, we have very limited options going forward. We’ve seen Bannigan deployed on the left this season, a position he should never play as it completely erodes his best asset in my opinion (ball retention) and Welsh in the central role in front of the two sitting midfielders, which again doesn’t suit because he drops so deep to pick up the ball. I think most would agree that when on form, all three players are amongst our best so it’s surely in our interests to find a system more accommodating for them. All three of the above players tend to operate in our half which in turn leaves our more attacking players isolated. This kind of isolation has punctuated Archie’s time as manager. When he took over, we had to become a bit more conservative because if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have won the league. But we’ve always had a guy who can link the play – Erskine then Higginbotham. When either were out, namely the latter last season, we encountered the same problems that we are now facing. There’s been a lot of talk about Stevenson in the last week, whether he contributes enough, whether he’s still capable of playing at this level, whether he’s a closet Hearts fans; but I feel a bit sorry for him because he’s rarely played in what I would say is his best position. He’s not a striker – surely to God we’ve learned that now? – and he’s a tad too ham-fisted to play in the hole. His best and most fruitful spells in his career have come when he’s played on the right – and that’s where he should play. So in conclusion, I think we have a number of players in our small squad who are capable of playing certain roles in certain formations but not in others. To repeat a word I used earlier, we really do seem intent on shoehorning individuals into a system that might not be maximising their abilities. And ultimately, the responsibility for addressing this lies at the manager’s door.

Would that be the same Tade who scored for Steuau on Sunday?

I don't want to spend too much time on a post-mortem of Saturday's performance; we were well beaten by a team who are really riding the crest of a wave just now and will almost certainly finish in the top three. However, a couple of short observations: I've never hidden the fact that I'm not a great fan of Frans; I think he's a big haddy and he caused us countless problems on Saturday with his ropey distribution. He shanked the ball out pretty much straight from kick off and that set the tone. He played numerous passes into Bannigan, Miller and Welsh when they were marked and facing our own goal which inevitably caused us to lose possession. He's rash and gets too close to his man, making it easy for guys of Juanma's calibre to turn him. When Lindsay is fit, I think he should be an automatic pick. With Seaborne being left footed as well, it's unlikely that this will happen straight away but it'll only be a matter of time until Frans is suspended again. We can't afford to carry a player like Amoo; he doesn't offer enough offensively or defensively. I couldn't believe my eyes when he actually stopped to protest to the referee while the ball was still in play after a Hearts player had went down in the box following a corner. He has tremendous pace by all accounts yet rarely squares the full-back up to beat him up the line. The old Adam Strachan, kick-the-ball-and-run style might be a more effective use of his speed but either way, I've not seen anything to change my opinion that he's a bench player at best. McDaid showed in his short time on the pitch what we require from a winger and must be in contention for tomorrow. Without Lawless, we lack any ingenuity in the final third and leave Dools badly isolated up front. Really need another body who can genuinely play "in the hole" so to speak because Stevenson's best position is on the right, not behind the striker. Say what you like about Higginbotham's form last year but I think it's evident that we're missing his ability to get on the ball and drag us up the pitch. Tomorrow is a good opportunity to get a win on the board and carry a bit of momentum forward into another difficult game at the weekend. We've had a difficult start, made even more difficult by our own indiscipline/refereeing incompetence (delete as applicable) but County's trouncing win at Rugby Park makes last week's draw even sorer to take.