Tannochsidebear

Would expect a QF of us, tims, sheep, 'well, arabs, jambos, ross co & ict. Would be quite a QF line-up! Both us and Jambos (who got Killie away) as the two best unseeded sides avoided the best of the seeded teams so the draw was rather lame.

Bheasts get a home draw against Raith Tie of the round Hibs v Sheep

St Johnstone at Ibrox That will do fine

Good to see that the European teams getting a bye works out so well for them. They have all been eliminated before the round has finished that they got a bye for!! I dont recall the last 16 being seeded before, can anyone clarify that?

I heard from a good source at the weekend that his Agent actually begged him not to take the bheasts offer (agent is a bear), as did his parents who are now devastated. Despite all this, Allan still went ahead and signed. Shows you the kind of person he is, and that we have actually dodged a bullet there.

As i said, it is not cut and dried with the information publicly available. I understand what you are saying completely, but as it is late August it was not too long to wait to see if a bid was forthcoming, and if not and we released the player to get his wages off the books (with absolutely no pay-off) on 1 September and Hibs snapped him up, I wouldn't have criticised. For the sake of a week we have allowed ourselves to be duped by an agent and I was hoping those days were over.

OK thanks BD, it seems the BBC got their stats wrong. Not for the first time! So he is about 23rd in line for a starting slot instead of further down, still funny! Even more so when added to the info in the thread above about bonuses.

I would love to believe you are right, and I have a lot more faith in the current board than any board of the last 30 years, but that is not to say I don't expect them to make mistakes. Of course, the likelihood is that there is a lot more info not disclosed about the facts surrounding this, but on the face of it it looks like McGregor's agent has done us up a cracker. We think we are doing the guy a favour and letting him go to a non-rival, and instead he goes to our biggest rival (as anticipated at time of writing!) for this title. We should have allowed him to transfer to St Johnstone for no fee, not released him at this stage and allow him to go to Hibs. If it got to deadline night and no bids were forthcoming, we can make the option to release him at that time, not now.

Mutually agreeing to end a contract is the very definition of allowing him to leave on a free! While I agree we have acted very decently, this decent behaviour has cost us money, and allowed a hated rival to gain a player at our expense for free. I have no concern this will cost us in terms of league points or placing, just that we have again been shafted over a bit when it comes to exiting players at worst, or missed a trick for a fee at best.

I am disgusted we let McGregor go to Hibs for free, especially after the way their blind hatred of our club manifested itself in the Allan affair. It would have been a victory if we even got £50K for him. Look at McGeoch - celtic didnt want him, they knew that Hibs did, and got a fee for him despite him having one year left on his deal. Really bad business by us here and as one of the first proper bits of transfer dealings that our new CEO (from Motherwell, forgot his name already!) has overseen I must say I am bitterly disappointed, nay raging, that this was allowed to happen. We better sharpen up our ideas in our dealings, and fast, if we are to properly compete with our enemy, who seem to be miles ahead in this department. As an aside as this thread is also bringing Allan into it, I find it highly amusing and pretty ironic that in a celtic side that made 9 changes and rested all their main players for the walkover at Tannadice, that Allan still couldn't get a game for the virtually second 11. When I heard they made 9 changes I assumed he played, checked it last night to find he was an unused sub. Hilarious.

Not too surprised given his limited opportunities under Warburton. As others have said he was our best defender last season, albeit getting judged alongside Captain Calamity would make anyone look like a superstar. I hope we have mutually agreed to let him go without any severance pay as he has another club lined up to go to. I would hate to see the situation we found ourselves in so many times previously whereby we pay up a players contract and they jump straight into another club. It doesnt save us any money if we pay him his contract in full. If we have made it clear to the player he is not in the plans, and at 30 he wants to play and not sit in the stiffs, he can ask for a free transfer without any pay-off to allow him to get the best possible deal (wont be anything like the money he earned here) for himself for perhaps the next 2-3 years at a new club. If he asks to be released with a pay-off, we should always refuse as when the window shuts he cannot move and will be ruining his career by not playing. He may be happy to sit and take the money, and thats fair enough, but if his agent has a club lined up, he shouldnt be getting anything more from us. I would have thought he was worth something, even a loan fee, and if it turns out he signs for Hibs I will be furious after the Allan affair that we have went out of our way to allow one of our players to go there when we didnt have to.

There must be a huge question mark over their ability to take over Morton under the SFA FPP test. The carnage they oversaw at Rangers under their watch & controlling interest SHOULD prevent them from ever getting involved in football again.

Done it twice now, a thoroughly enjoyable, informative and entertaining day out. An absolute must for any Bear.

Great news that we have another sell-out for a second tier league match. We must thank Alan Stubbs for stoking up the hype surrounding the game and earning us more money!

I hear you Zappa, but I cannot think it would be anything other than an easy victory. Would love to see what crowd we could get, given the next round is scheduled for a Saturday afternoon.

As usual, anyone at home will do for me. If it has to be away, Queens Park will be perfect. A big pitch, plenty of tickets, and an easy victory.

In normal circumstances I would prefer we rear our own players, or buy fully committed and hungry players that are here for the long haul. However we are a bit stuck this season in that we don't have a top tier budget but we needed about 10 recruits to replace last years failures. We cannot possibly buy top tier title winning players who can take us into Europe while we are in the second tier. MW has brought in a few players who will see us through this year, but we need extra quality next year. We cannot sign players on one year deals so the next best is to get a selection of players and supplement them with 2/3 loanees. This gets us through this season, and frees up spaces in the squad for quality additions for our attack on 55 next season. While we are very early into the Warburton revolution, there are question marks over some of our team as to wether they will be good enough to deliver 55. I believe this is a 3 or 4 window transformation, so we must use the loan market for short term fixes while we wait to purchase the quality to complete the side.

We put 10 past Peterhead (or some other Highland non-league team in the 3rd round of the Scottish Cup in January 1996. Just about the only game I missed that season as my wife was expecting and it was a bit far to go in case she went into labour, and we went and scored 10. I was gutted for ages about missing that game!

Never mind this Scott Allan nonsense, Cummings is a player I rate highly and thought was always dangerous last season when we played Hibs. For my money he was by far Hibs best player, and in winning top league goalscorer he should have also won POTY for the division ahead of Allan. Never have rated these player voting awards so hay-ho. Our defence will be tested, again, against Cummings on Sunday, and hopefully they show some improvements as the defence has looked shaky at best so far, given how little they actually have to do. Cummings has to say these things and Hibs have to draw on their easy victories last season. If I were a Hibbee I would be really happy with how they played for 30 mins last month, when they should have been 3-0 up, and have hopes that if they can take their chances they will have a good chance. Obviously from our perspective we know we will be far too strong for them and another high-scoring victory is on the cards. My predictor will probably be something like 5-2 or 4-2. Both teams to score should be about 1/2 for this match.

Against Valetta at Ibrox around 1990. I think we won 6-0 or thereabouts. Not to be confused with the games against the same opponents from the early 80's where big hen broon scored 4 mentioned earlier in this thread.

I was at that game when the crowd were chanting for Woods to take the pen and he reluctantly took it, and missed!

I don't know who it is but I just love that we have obviously been working on the deal for a while and the scum in the media don't have a clue who it is.

Agreed!!!!

Someone please tell me this - out of the seven games we played against Hibs last season, how many did Allan actually have a good game against us? What about in the 4 Edinburgh derby matches against Hearts? I for one dont recall him standing out at all in the matches between us (didnt watch any Edinburgh derbies so dont know that one). It therefore seems to me he is terribly inconsistent for a 23 year old. And remember this was against the worst Rangers team in living memory. What I take out of this whole affair is that Hibs have lost a player they rate highly and therefore are weaker than they were, which is good for us. We have missed out on spending a huge wedge of cash (£10Kpw if reports are to be believed!) on an unproven player plus a reasonable fee that we can divert now to a Warburton pick. I have yet to be convinced that Warburton really wanted him, given our courting of him started before we appointed the manager, and I am content when Warburton says that he has got all the players he has asked for. I thought that phrase (from a week ago) was telling. As for Allan being better than what we have now, I very much doubt it and I really dont see where he would have played in our team. On the bench would have been my guess. Which one of Halliday, Holt, Law is he better than really? Law has underperformed mostly over last two years after a strong start, but then again who hasn't? (apart from MacLeod). Everyone gets a clean slate under a proper manager and Law has been much improved this season, with more improvement still to come I think. It may be that his position in the team is up for grabs, but I really dont think Allan would have given us the consistency and quality required to play there.

Delighted to miss out on someone I never rated. We can better spend our money elsewhere.