Tannochsidebear

Shouldnt need to ask them, they should be all over this already. Given their performance to date, and their whole inception, the "dig" is fairly valid IMO. It is up to Club1872 to prove themselves worthy of the title "fans group" not the other way around.

Absolutely spot on it is. We shall watch with interest.

Just going through the thread again and noticed in my post I have completed forgotten about Windass, Crooks, Thompson and a couple of the other U20's who are itching to break through and need some bench time to continue their development. We really need to play a 5-6-4 formation to fit everyone in!

I wouldnt have thought we will get anywhere near a sell-out. If we break 30K I will be impressed.

My first 11 would be; Wes Tav Kiernan Hill Wallace Holt Barton Nico Waghorn Dodoo McKay Subs: Gilks, Wilson, Halliday, Forrester, Rossiter, Hodson, O'Halloran I havent seen enough of Gilks to see that he is better than the man in possession, so Wes stays for now. We simply have to break up the dumb & dumber partnership of last season, so it is Hill plus one, Kiernan preferred for me. Tav is a threat going forward and against Hamilton at home we will have a lot of forward possession, so he gets in ahead of Hodson for me. Into midfield and Barton & Nico are nailed on, so for me last season's outstanding midfield player, Holt, has to be fitted in. I felt on Monday Barton & Nico were both quite deep-lying at times with Halliday ahead of them, I think Holt would be much better suited to these forward runs for these two to pick out and is a decent finisher. Up front and Waggy & Barrie are a shoe-in, so it only leaves the other position. I would go for Dodoo to play the central role as he looks (albeit from not much action) to have better goalscoring instincts and gets into good positions and this gives him the nod for me ahead of MOH. The better strength for us this season is on the bench, where we have good cover for all positions. I am delighted that I can honestly put a better bench together and not have to include the inept Miller, although his clearly explosive photos of MW & DW will see him get a place on the bench ahead of someone more deserving! If we can find a real quality centre half to replace Kiernan, and a ruthless striker we will be very close to the real deal, and all without spending a fortune. Well done to all involved at the club to get us to here in 3 windows (2.5 really) from the squad McCall had to try to get something out of.

It was a poor decision made in haste. Hard to go back on it now though. It will always be the Govan Stand to me.

Got to be a wind-up! Dont know anything about the boy, but if he is anything like his dad, i'll pass thanks. I dont want a diving, cheating, whining, moaning guy around our harmonious squad.

Your right, it wasnt there yesterday when we were discussing it before. But it turns out I had heard right and that the best 4 group winners plus the Euro flops get the seedings so we cant get Hibs (or the bheasts) in the last 16.

March to the stadium? I wish they wouldnt call it a fans march when it is really only for wee neds trying to be "pure dead ultra an that", not really Rangers fans at all in my book having had the misfortune to sit near them a few times during the "journey" at various away grounds. They dont even watch the game much, it is all about watching each other, with stupid songs, pyro etc I for one would be much happier without them. Rangers fans can create an atmosphere no problem if the product on the park is good enough, always have, always will.

We have kept squad number 7 free...............

The game is truly in safe hands with "windfalls" like this! £1.38M between 44 clubs for a whole competition. The club coming bottom of the EPL this season will get £2.6M PER GAME in tv rights alone. Great job Neil & Peter, keep it up.

I had feared as much for Hardie. I would have much preferred to see him in the team (or even matchday squad) ahead of the truly awful Miller, who again had a couple of bad misses on Friday and is as useful as a chocolate teapot. Good luck to the lad, but I fear Warburton has already decided he doesnt fancy him.

Must be a different Martin Bain from the one we had, as the guy described above is nothing like the total waste of money we had working as Murray's patsy for years.

Looking forward to my first look in the flesh at the new side tonight, as although I seen the game on tv on Friday it is not the same as seeing it live where you can see the movement and positional sense of the players off the ball much more than you can on tv which essentially just tracks the ball. Hoping to get a good look at the new players Barton, Hill, Krancjar, Dodoo, Windass who are ready to feature. I am worried about the lack of action for Hardie, who is miles better than Mr Misser and should be getting some gametime based on his goalscoring run at Falkirk in the second half of last season. It looks like Warburton doesnt rate him. If he doesnt start tonight it must be more likely he will be loaned out again.

There are very few right backs in our history that were not better than Ricksen! Having only seen Hodson once on Friday it is impossible to say what standard he is, but I would imagine he will safely be better than Fernando was. I wish FR all the very best in his fight against that most horrible of illnesses, but that can't take away from the fact he was useless at RB!

I don't disagree with any of that, but it is the one part of our season that was really poor, and I am hoping the manager will be more aware of this for this season.

We will see what the Spurs boss thinks of him soon enough so not something I am going to speculate on at this time. As I have said in my reply to Craig above, I thought Ball looked better than RK, DW or AH, but MW clearly disagreed. It is on that judgement (i.e. Warburtons not mine) that I cant see us bringing him back for a second season given we have improved our options in this area. Time will tell if Crooks is being lined up for CH, to me it looks like he is Barton's cover at DM as that is where he played well for AS last season by all reports. I think we still need a starting CH to partner Hill. See if we can get rid of DW before the window closes, he is our Efe and will again cost us goals and points if he is played consistently. I expect Hill to take charge and talk RK through the game and we may see a much improved version of RK this season as a result, but I would be much happier with a quality CH coming in.

I completely agree with you that Ball looked (slightly) better than dumb and dumber last season at Centre back. However Warburton thought differently and he sees them more often than we do. For me Ball was far better than Halliday at defensive midfielder as well, but again Warburton thought not. Hence why I described him in the terms I did. If he wasnt good enough to get a regular run at either position last season, with the improvements we have made in both positions he will be even further down the order if we brought him back this season surely?

I have checked the SPFL pages as well and cant see anything about seedings. Cant remember where I read it, I think it might have been a journo on twitter, so probably wrong given there is nothing about it on the official cup webpage. The rules and regs document on the SPFL website has not been updated for this season yet so it still has the straight knockout rules from last season. Thats been a waste of my time as I was ensuring that if we won our game tomorrow we would be in the top 4 as there are only 3 other 100% record teams left so we simply needed to win to guarantee a "seeding". So getting back to the previous posting, it looks like we CAN get wee Lenny's mob at Ibrox in the last 16. I would take that!

The Europa League group stages is still worth between £8-£10M to them depending on the draw. We simply cannot afford for them to have this additional cash. If they fail to make the group stages, they then need to sell off their best player(s) in Jan, instead of bringing in more quality for the run-in. While seeing them get gubbed by also-rans every other Thursday is a good laugh, this season we need to try to bridge the financial gap as much as possible given we have no Europe at all and no merchandise income. The one good point is as you rightly say they are always going to be playing Sundays and gives us the chance to put pressure on by winning on the Saturday.

The biggest area of overall improvement we need to make is to win the tough away games. We absolutely failed to do this last season, losing twice at Easter Rd, losing twice at Falkirk, and also losing at Raith once. If we have 5 away defeats this season (esp if two are at the piggery) it will be very difficult to win the title as our main opponents will not lose a lot of games given the gulf in quality and resources. We have tough away games this season at the piggery, pittodrie, Tynecastle, ICT, and we absolutely must play better in these games than we did in these type of fixtures last season. It was our outstanding home form that saw us safely home last season, and that will be important again but the key for me will be winning at these tough places. Does the manager need to change things for these games, or will we simply stick to our guns and hope we take more of our chances and defend better which was the route cause of our defeats last season. Of course we will have the odd bad day and lose some games, what we cannot afford is to always lose the big away games.

Hope not, we need better. Anyone who couldn't get in our team at CH ahead of Wilson last season can't be very good, and same could be said for anyone not able to displace an out of position Halliday at DM. We now have better options at DM, and hopefully we bring in another CH before the window shuts.

I have definitely read somewhere that the 4 Euro clubs and 4 with the best record from group winners get seedings in last 16, which has been a seeded round for many years.

Unfortunately we can't get Hibs (or the other European stalwarts) in the last 16 of the LC as we will both be seeded. Some lucky unseeded team will get the good fortune to eliminate Hibs due to a bad decision, unbelievable bit of luck, or downright cheating.

Come on now, it is whatever Peter tells them to do of course. They will just have to be passing pro-Celtic agenda 4-1 now instead of 5-0, and we won't have the balls to call them out on it.