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He clearly goes towards the ball and impacts Maswanhise collecting the rebound. It should have been a retake.

Do you not get any attention in the house?

Exactly. All keepers, and indeed players, make mistakes and I accept that. My point is though that dealing with high balls is a weak part of his game. I accept that you can get keepers who are relatively small but who are great in the air. The late Jocky Robertson springs to mind. But, they are very much the exception. My knowledge of the English Premier League is limited, at best, but I do know that the Chelsea keeper, at 6-0, is the smallest in that league. He's an outlier. Andy Goram famously said that he didn't do cross balls, because of his height. He was an exceptional shot stopper and that was his role. To compensate for that, Rangers had 2 full backs whose job was to prevent any crosses. In the unlikely event that the opposing team managed to get a cross or corner in, then they had 2 huge central defenders whose job was to protect Goram. Last season, JBA's approach was to retain possession to such an extent that it was unlikely that our opponents were unlikely to test Ward much in the air. This season I don't know if we've got this quite right.

Don’t think anybodies said they expect him to be error free so thats not the point… u don’t think we’re fragile from set pieces? if i was another team I’d be putting long throws, corners right on top of him

Roma ladies away strip would be better..

Fact Ricky Foster thought it wasn't a pen says it all

Yup Welsh and Moormann would be some combination

Watch the replay on Sportscene while they discuss it and you'll see Gogic met all those criteria. His encroachment allowed him to affect JT on the rebound.

Seems like there were plenty people saying the player who encroached interfered with JT getting the rebound. I haven’t looked close enough to comment on that.

That’s the best we’ll get. I don’t see where our next win is coming from. 0-0

As somebody mentioned earlier, encroachment is now only penalised if it affect the kicker or if they play the ball after. Ridiculously because too many penalties were been retaken, so instead of continuing to enforce the law until the players learned, they decided to legalise it. Pundits should know this it's their job!!

Fixed it for you

You think an EPL scouting team wasn't aware of his height before they signed him? He's not trying to head the ball, and you don't need to be super tall to have hands that reach higher than a tall player's head. I'm still not sure why fans are fine with midfielders that make a couple of stray passes or strikers that miss a good chance or two, but expect a keeper to be 100% error free in every game. You only have to go back to Thursday to see a keeper with a top team make a howler from Longelo's shot. Take a look at Match of the Day on any given week and you'll see a couple of mistakes from the first team starter goalies.

I think the problem is that to get players that can play the way we want to play, but are physically bigger and stronger, you have to pay more money than we can afford. We can have good players, or we can have big players. Its a sliding scale with a definite price point. Out of interest, I looked at our stats for today on the BBC match report. We won 10 aerial duels to St Mirrens 5 and 17 tackles to St Mirrens 20. So despite us both thinking we lack physicality, we actually seem to have stacked up ok today.

I don't know if it's an unpopular opinion, but that strip is far too Hearts / 2nd tier South American style for me. It's also a pointless colour scheme to avoid clashes, Stick to the white with some variation on the claret/amber trim.

Yes, I think he can contribute to the first team this season and I doubt if we'd let him go and certainly not without another midfielder arriving.

Good post Joe. Of course, things are still to settle down and we're still very much work in progress. AJ has still to mould the players into his system. I'm not privy to all the detailed metrics that our recruitment team uses to identify and source players but I'd be shocked if physicality and experience don't come into the equation somewhere. Surely a keeper's qualities should dovetail with those of the defenders in front of him? Like it or not, and I don't like it, many other teams will test us out at set pieces and crosses and we have to be prepared for such tactics. Years ago, I was castigated on here for wanting bigger, more physical, players in our squad. I had a hard, maybe impossible, task to convince some others that that didn't equal thuggish hammer throwers. Freiburg proved my point. You can be a faster, more skilled but bigger athlete than your opponents. Usain Bolt was hardly vertically challenged at 6-5 and 15 stones in weight but he was quite fast. It seems like an oversight in our summer recruitment, which to be fair, seems to have gone well in most other respects.

I think that just stems from Naysmith having him at Stenny last season. I may have inadvertently started this rumour with my Ayr United friends a few weeks ago before it was clear that there was a good chance Olly could be a first team player fornus this season. If we did let him go, it would be a step upnfor him from last season. But Im no longer certain he needs it, and Im not sure we would let him go now.

True up to a point Grizzly, but I feel we have missed Stephen Welsh at the back. He is a big lad and no-one pushed him around. Also Elliot Watt is somewhat bigger than Joe Hodge.

Persistent rumours on the P & B Ayr thread that they want Olly Whyte on loan. IF that is the the case then we'd need to bring in another central midfielder.

The only thing I would say about physicality is the players we lostvlast season were hardly renowned for their physical presence so it's not as if things have changed much

Not unpopular at all. I agree wholeheartedly! 🧡❤️🧡

Im pretty happy with where we are right now. But I agree our season wont start properly until we get back to one game a week and the manager has the opportunity to get his ideas across to the players on the training pitch on a daily basis. I think thats why it went from so good to so bad, so quickly today. We were brilliant, right up to the point we lost our shape and structure, and then we werent. Its very fine lines right now, with timing of runs and passes so important to whether we attack from a position of security, or leave ourselves wide open to counter attack. Its something that Jens took a little while to get on top of last season, but when we did, it was impressive. I agree about the lack of physicality in the team though. Not sure what we can do about it at this stage, although I think Olly Whyte has a bit of dig about him. Do we trust throwing him in though and who do we leave out?

Would be good to get 3 points here as its a home game against a beatable opponent. However, its just another game in the series of games with no real break or preparation in between, asking yet more of our players who have been full on for over a month now. Dundee United have been a bit of an enigma in their performances and results so far, but the nature of their win on Saturday must give them confidence, despite being without their manager at the moment. Id guess we will see more rotation within the squad and it will depend exactly how that plays out what success we can expect. I will settle for us putting in another good performance and standing by our principles. Hopefully we can get our structure correct and minimise the goals against to give us the opporrunity to win it. A point would be acceptable. 3 points great.