Woodstock Jag

Pesky router's playing up at the moment. I blame the Coalition's cuts, after all everyone's blaming everything else on them at the moment so it's worth a shot. Anyway, I've got a wee thought that should make people think very carefully before voting in May: "Iain Gray First Minister"

Whilst I broadly agree with the original poster, the Lib Dems are going to get massacred in the Holyrood Elections. And it's completely undeserved too.

It is theirs. Until someone else wins it, that is.

This is Australia's.

The problem is that by signing up as Jedi, Voodoo monster or whatever, you artificially increase the "% who have a religion" figure even if it's clear to anyone objectively looking at it that you're taking the piss.

Long story short is they aren't. I would imagine that our pre-existing debt levels, to whom we owe it, and on what terms it is owed have a big impact on our budget. You will probably also find we have higher overheads than other clubs relating to the size, design and location of our stadium.

The pitch was absolutely fine until about December. It looks bad, but I'm not convinced for a minute that it's as bad as some people make it out to be, or that it's substantially worse than some of the other pitches in the first division which don't have the extra strain put on them. Attendances are plummeting all round Scottish football. To blame our pitch in isolation doesn't provide the real reason IMO.

They didn't boo him off. They jeered him with more than a little sarcasm.

Had a bit of tech trouble but this week's Jagscast is available now. Clicky

Fundamentally disagree. Part of the unpredictability means that we'll win as many as we lose and score as many as we concede. We're never going to be world-beaters, and we're seldom if ever going to be thundering champions scoring consistently 2-3 goals a game and keeping tight at the other end. I don't accept the premise that by having players who don't fit into a boring rigid system somehow that means it's not a "real team". I also don't accept the premise that unpredictability means that the team can't work together. I would rather watch a Thistle side which challenged and was exciting but won, drew and lost games than one which was boring but won 1-0 a lot. If I wanted a predictable team that stuck to the same gameplan and played the same way all the time and was "consistent" I wouldn't be supporting Thistle. People don't go to the football because it's boring and it's expensive. It's not just because a team isn't winning. A team can be competitive and exciting and unpredictable without winning all the time. If we just won every game 1-0 it would be really boring and victories would feel hollow. It's the unpredictability that is the attraction of Thistle. Erskine is very much part of the team's make-up and is a game-changer. I don't really care if he's defensively hopeless or occasionally looks like a right diddy. The one or two times he gets it right in a game are genuinely exciting. Of course you need consistent players in a team, but if it's just a team of David Rowsons you're not going to get those moments of brilliance or a game-changing quality.

I want to be entertained on a Saturday. For me a predictable and consistent system at this level comes at the expense of genuine entertainment. Erskine's erratic and unpredictability is what makes football interesting. He produces moments of magic and madness. That's what I want to see. An element of that is absolutely essential to having a team people want to watch. If we had a consistently workable system but we scored the same goals all the time and became too predictable other teams would work us out. The best players in the world don't have a role; they just play football and do it intuitively. The most effective and challenging teams are the ones that are able to come up with something the other team hadn't anticipated or trained against. He's raw, but Erskine provides that. People often said the same about Harkins. When Erksine plays well we play well. His bits of magic turn a largely predictable, mostly solid game-plan into a match-winning opportunity. The reason we lose is usually because we huff and puff with no game-plan or because of careless individual errors. You can't expect game-changers to change all games.

Wikipedia page history is a wonderful thing.

Last season we got 48 points. After 26 games we had 38 points. Around that time we were sitting 5th and were 19 points clear of 9th place, albeit most teams in the league had about 3-4 games in hand over us. By the end of March we'd played 30 games, had 41 points and were 13 points clear of 9th place (Morton and Ayr in 8th+9th with 2 and 3 games in hand). c.f. this season where we sit on 32 points after 26 games. In short, our current situation is not as good as last.

I thought he was rotten, to be honest. Was astonished when we took off Erskine and McNamara but not him. I genuinely thought the MOTM award was ironic.

Now that, good sir, is substantive bollocks. Erskine is one of the few reasons left to keep going to Firhill these days.

Not really. No worse than "over dramatics" over a player having a slightly less rubbish game than half the rest of his team today.

I'm not "defending" anything. I just think your approach: singling out Grehan and telling him effectively to off is more of a reflection on you than it is him.

The last time I checked, telling a joke on a football forum behind a veil of semi-anonymity is not the same as saying it over a public address system at a football match in a quasi-official capacity.

People are completely missing the point here. Grehan is being singled out when, despite being shit, we can't do much, if any, better. 12 months ago we had exactly the same sort of views being hurled at Paddy Boyle. The reality is Grehan wasn't *that* bad today and people are deluded if they think we can expect to have two substantial goal-scorers on our books as a matter of course. Fraser has potential, but with the greatest of respect he's still a boy. He's scored a couple of good goals. One against a fledgling Stirling Albion and another against Queens. He's even younger than me, and despite him being one for the future I don't think you can either read too much into a handful of 10-15 minute spells or use it as a reason to get on the backs of more experienced players. As for your Buchanan comparison I don't think it's remotely relevant. Buchanan got a lot of praise too, and I never recall people saying of him that he was "pathetic" and that he "shouldn't let the door hit his arse on the way out". I think most people are of this view. It's no good reason for people to get on his back when he actually didn't have a particularly "dung" game today, and hasn't recently. Indeed he was far from the worst player on the park. No we can't choose not to live with it. He is contracted to next season, we have no money and our Club is dying. There is sweet all we can do about the product on the park.

I didn't accuse you of jeering him off the park. I was referring to those who did, who like you are among his detractors. You clearly are singling out Martin Grehan because, despite him being far from our worst player today, and recently, you have started a thread saying he is "pathetic" and should "not let the door hit his arse on the way out". If you're not singling him out, I can think of at least 4 or 5 other players on our books in the same ballpark. The question is therefore "Why Grehan?" Of course people pay good money to watch us. Just like people pay £15 to watch 2nd Division garbage at the likes of Ayr. As a Club we are broke, the playing budget is next to non-existent and the cold hard reality is that some of our players are just going to have to be shit. Live with it.

I thought it was pretty tasteless too, to be honest. Definitely one for the "too soon" category.

He's been given hardly any game time until the last few weeks. Give the guy a break. He's also not been taking a wage from us for two seasons. He had 5 (yes that's right, 5) games at the tail end of last season when our strikers couldn't hit a barn door and a lot of his appearances this season came from the bench with 20 minutes to go when we still had Buchanan.

I don't rate most of our players as footballers. It doesn't mean I feel the need to jeer a player of the pitch when they hardly had a horrific game and it doesn't mean that I call his effort "pathetic" when it blatantly wasn't.

I think you (and the people who celebrated when he was subbed off) were being very harsh on him. He mucked up a shot in the first half but asides that I thought he didn't do much wrong all game and is much improved in terms of positional awareness etc than he was at the start of the season. I don't rate him as a footballer, but he's not as bad as some make out. Shaun Fraser is a talent and in time absolutely should get more game opportunities. But in case you hadn't noticed Grehan is one of two senior squad members who is in contention for games now: Donnelly one can only presume is an absolute last resort where injuries scupper things and Doolan and Grehan are having to fill the gap. Don't get on Grehan's back just because he's all we've got.

I would like to thank the person in hospitality who gave McGowan Man of the Match. That was the most entertaining thing to have happened all game. He should have been hooked at half-time. McCall's substitutions (in terms of who he took off) were a nonsense. Really pish game. Robertson was very poor in defence.