Fellow Traveller

It's funny. Rod Petrie was quite outspoken at first about sporting integrity and has since gone very quiet. Now it's reported that he had a secret meeting with Charles Green and was a key figure in drawing up this blackmail threat to the SFL clubs. That'll go down well with the Hibs fans. I wonder if anyone else was there.

They were laughing on the radio yesterday at the exclamation mark that had been inserted after "Complete financial meltdown". I think we can safely assume that was one of Neil's executive decisions. Amazed he didn't go with "Fact!"

Yeah, it takes a special sort of genius to take a problem that exists entirely within one member club and manage to capsize the entire national game in your bungling efforts to deal with it. And these are professional administrators. Isolate and remove and let's get on with the game.

Popped up in the Record the other day and now seems to have descended even deeper into farce: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/football/sfl/2012/07/01/rangers-in-crisis-newco-face-uncertain-future-as-slf-chiefs-call-in-lawyers-over-vote-rules-86908-23903055/ I hope Turnbull Hutton and a few others absolutely shred these idiots on Tuesday.

I managed to keep a blog going for a fair while mostly fuelled on a mix of valid criticisms and a few cheap shots aimed at our old board of directors. I didn't rate them, but at least you could sort of see where they fitted into the picture. And then about a year ago, with most of them off the main stage (but lurking in the shadows), I realised I didn't understand at all how the club worked any more - who did what, who owned what, who was owed what, who controlled what, who had who by the short and curlies. To this day I don't know how Billy Allan figures in any of it. The relationships between these guys and their companies and Propco and Thistle are very hard to read, and that's as someone who has taken an unhealthy level of interest in club politics for quite a while. It's very much an insider's affair. That seemed like a good point to give up writing about them and let it all go. No loss there, but purely as a fan it makes me a bit uneasy. So if anyone can provide a crash course of Partick Thistle for Dummies, the whole ownership and control situation in clear and simple terms, please bring it on.

Two Ross Nisbets! There's only two Ross Nisbets!

I'm very definitely a semi-retired greetin' face. Fresh start, fresh blood. Step up, people. You know you can do it.

Thanks for the responses. I take Junior's point that relations have been (or maybe seemed) better, but it's a bit like they say about free speech - it's only when somebody says something awkward/offensive/unpopular that you find out if you've really got it. This past week has been the acid test and it looks like a massive fail to me. Reading these boards the last few days, the thing that strikes me most is that there's no shortage of articulate people who "get it". And yet the only way you can even hope to impact on Mr Beattie's intentions is by threatening to walk away from the club you love. That's a terrible state of affairs. I know the very mention of this comes with a lot of baggage at this club, but I'm just suggesting gently that you might at some point want to organise yourselves.

More pressing matters occupy our minds at the moment, but it's 3 or 4 years now since David Beattie stood in front of the fans and asked them to cut off the Jags Trust at the knees and take a leap of faith with him and his team. A lot of the boardroom deadwood has gone since then and the club is probably fresher and more stable than it was before. All of which is commendable. But I definitely remember being told by wiser heads than me that this was also the way to increase the influence of the fans in the running of the club. Unhelpful old cynics like myself have largely kept out of the way since then. So as you look around at statements coming thick and fast from other clubs, how content are you with the respect and influence supporters have at Partick Thistle, even when you resort to the old gun-to-the-head "I'm never coming back" routine? I'm too long out of it now to be able to judge, so when the dust settles on this humiliating little skirmish, I'd just be interested to hear how that's working out for you guys. Yours in sport, etc etc.

Cheers. Removed my response. Fighting amongst ourselves is not going to help anything. Been down that road way too many times.

I can see the difference between a boycott now to bring the point home as opposed to what will happen later which is not a boycott, but is the complete abandonment of football by a lot of people who love it but hate what's being done. But I'd agree that if they haven't heard the message now, they're just not listening. Re a meeting with the board, why would they? As I've said to others: They're in favour of selling out to newco. The fans aren't. They don't care what you think. (I'm amazed this is still seen as a controversial statement.) They will have a secret vote. If you were in their shoes, would you stand up in front of a few hundred fans and try to sell them this?

They have no position on Newco, so now you want one on Kenco? Always the awkward sod.

If nothing else, this thread has got me seriously worried about turning 50.

This must be what the coalition talks were like. "We've got these Tories where we want them. This is a once in a lifetime chance to get in there to change things before evil is restored." "Great idea, Nick. Where do we sign up?"

In a word, Jim, nothing. We're not unaware of the financial realities facing the club and the whole game. We've all known it for years and flapped around trying to improve things, with no help at all from the football authorities who had produced a rotten sport in Scotland even before Rangers made it ten times worse. So they should fix it now, just like they could and should have tried to fix it years ago. Bundling it all up in a package deal to save newco is bullshit of the highest order and nobody's buying it. It's an insult to the intelligence. Nice marketing tactic, let's see how that works out. The vote will happen and whatever way it goes, the fans will make or break the club. For me, I'll either make a greater effort to get along to games this season or I'll kiss goodye to this farce forever. I know many others will dig in and help keep things afloat and the very best of luck to them. But don't let the club try to sell us this garbage and expect people to shrug and carry on like nothing will have changed because everything will have changed. And for all our many failings over the years, I don't think there's a club in Scotland that doesn't have the moral high ground over Rangers. That being said, I wouldn't give an ounce of support, moral or financial, to a board behaving the way ours is behaving at the moment.

It may have been mentioned already, but the document says one benefit of putting newco into Div I is "Scottish Government remain committed to our community strategy". Shona Robison, Minister for Public Health and Sport, has confirmed on Twitter that this support will continue whichever way the decision goes. Just one small, but telling example of the deceptions being perpetrated by these shameless liars.

They weren't afraid to speak last week. Couldn't avoid Mr Beattie's views in the papers. And that was long after the nastiness of McCoist calling for outing the tribunal members and the threats that resulted. At best, this silence is out of sheer embarrassment. At worst, it's because they're really rooting for this plan to happen, like they said last week. And somewhere in the middle, where the truth usually sits, it's just plain cowardice. Edit to clarify: cowardice about facing their own fans, not threats from bigoted knuckledraggers.

Was thinking similar thoughts and then I saw Platini chuckling away with Blatter on the telly. We're on our own.

He was a standout on that future of the Scottish game debate they had a few months back, when all the officials were weaseling around. Whatever we think about his footwear and managerial approach, he looks like someone who actually has a sense of sporting fairness and some principles. Wish Thistle had one.

Seems to be what people are whispering as the day goes on. Fans' voices will be ignored, the vote will be taken in secret and the clubs (sadly with ours right in the mix) will gamble that the objections will die down and the old football habit will kick in and pull people back. What could have been a genuinely interesting season for us is now going to be all about "them". It's going to be the ugliest and most sickening spectacle ever seen and we're going to play along like the worst kind of pussies. The Old Firm grip is too tight and when push comes to shove the people running the game and running our club are perfectly content with that. Some of them are really quite thrilled at the prospect. Unless the Sevco does go bust, and that's got to be the best hope here, it'll be game over. Please go bust again, you cancerous swines, and maybe the rest of us will have a chance.

Then he should make his position clear. He's not been afraid to have a showdown with the shareholders over internal structuring issues at the club, so why so shy now? Except I think we all know why. Because he's on the bus for this proposal and is more concerned about how to get it past the fans than to listen to them and take a principled stand for the long-term good of the sport. This club is horribly broken, a legacy of various pisspoor decisions and non-decisions in recent years, and this is the chickens coming home to roost. Bad news for the fans, who don't have a property development to fall back on if it all goes belly up.

Exactly. If all of this is so good for Scottish football, let's see them take Rangers out of it and stand by the proposals. Vomit-inducing. They really have gone and killed the game to reanimate a corpse.

If the plan is approved, suddenly this newco has a business basis on which to build (leaving aside their many other problems). And the entire game in this country will have been sacrificed to give them that. As far as I'm aware from comments by the chairman and manager, just a week or two ago Thistle were progressing optimistically into a new season despite the tough economic circumstances we all face. Now we'll be told that without this poisonous fix to propel Rangers back up into the SPL as soon as humanly possible, we would not be able to survive. That's the big lie we're about to be sold.

Plain and simple, like the man says.

Much fuller details on that page now of the plan.