numpty

I'm sure he'll still be desperate to prove himself at Everton, too, given the time he's had of it. And let's not forget he's still only 28… if he'd been injury-free, he'd probably still be enjoying the form of his career right now, albeit the tail end of it. That's not really the time to be thinking about a move to somewhere you once said you'd like to finish it.

I got a letter a couple of weeks later.

I have a suspicion they might be holding some of the players back on purpose, to use as a bit of publicity stunt for a final push if we're a bit short as March 31st approaches. "Look who's signed up this week, we're nearly there now!" etc. I'm a bit in two minds about having current players contributing anyway, to be honest… if you don't get at least the whole first team to sign up, it makes the ones who haven't look a bit bad, even if they have perfectly good reasons for not wanting to. And sooner or later they'll all be moving on to other clubs, and at that point their contributions might well have to stop anyway, either voluntarily or at the wishes of their new employers. At the end of the day it should be a fans' thing, and I certainly don't expect all of our players to show the same long-term commitment to the club that the fans do.

You'd think not, but let's not forget he was doing it so poorly earlier on this season that he was possibly only one game away from the sack prior to Celtic's first visit to Fir Park in November, with the SPL title race apparently all but over at that point. Unfortunately, we probably kept him in a job that day...

I'm sure if we ever started filling an 8000-seater stadium every week, we'd soon have (or be able to secure) the funds to extend it a bit.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/scotland/6359497.stm Links to all the games are the same place they've always been as far as I can see, near the top of http://bbc.co.uk/sportscotland .

It did, but soul and atmosphere are two different things IMHO. There might be less (or at least, a different) atmosphere at Fir Park now than there was 25 years ago, but it still has much the same soul… otherwise folk wouldn't be complaining about leaving it behind for a "soulless" new build. Only analogy I can think of at this time of night is the difference between weather and climate I suppose -- weather/atmosphere is what you have at any given moment, climate/soul is what you have over a longer period of time, and to some extent defines a place and the people who inhabit it.

Personally, I'm getting a bit tired of this "soulless" argument. Soul comes from the people who fill a stadium, not from the architect's plans. Fill any stadium with 5000 'Well fans every other week and put a team on the park that gives them something to shout about, and it'll have soul aplenty.

Oops, aye, you're right of course. Always get confused when some sites list on/off target, and others list total/off target. Twelve (or even seven) is still a wee bit more than "a couple", mind you

According to the official stats, Celtic had 19 shots, we had 3...

We only (usually) get the goals on the Saturday night, not highlights as such. Don't know why that hasn't happened this week, but It happened the other week because it was 0-0, so no goals to show. Match highlights on the site are currently provided by the BBC, so only posted up some time after they appear on the BBC website. I presume we're hoping to provide our own highlights instead at some point in the future (probably once we're able to stream live video of games, not just audio…)

Oh absolutely, I'm not pointing the finger at him for our general ineffectiveness up front yesterday.

I'm also hoping it was part of the reason he was hooked early… hopefully it's not something he resorts to when things aren't really going his way, as they weren't yesterday for pretty much the first time since he arrived.

How can you even listen to that, first thing I do is turn the sound off when it's a Celtic TV feed!

If you do, say hello to my Celtic-supporting mate Kevin… that's where he goes to watch the Celtic games. (Well, I say "mate"… haven't actually seen him since Uni 20 years ago!)

Watching the BBC highlights again, it was actually a cracking save from Stack off Henrik's shot to touch it onto the bar. What a shame he only got to enjoy it for about 5 seconds...

One of the many problems with the BBC highlights these days, the commentary is being done by a guy in a studio the next day who usually wasn't even at the game, pretending that he was. Would be better just dubbing on their live radio commentary a lot of the time, at least you're getting genuine reactions with that.

Good photie of it in The Sun's report today: http://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/sport/spl/4147512/Motherwell-4-Hibernian-3.html

Probably no more than Skippy's… they both kept one foot on the ground, Higgy's was a proper mid-air effort!

Not sure they should really have been promising that (did they really?) when we might all be getting our money back next month if they haven't raised sufficient funds. Can't imagine we'd still be getting the free subscription if that happened.

No television pictures of the incident to review (though there are no actual quotes in this report): http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/football/spl/hearts/2012/02/22/sfa-take-no-action-over-hearts-captain-marius-zaliukas-alleged-gesture-86908-23760715/

I knew that one, to be fair… cf. Brøndby (Bronboo), Jan Mølby (Molboo), Søren Lerby (Lerboo) etc...

http://sport.stv.tv/football/scottish-premier/motherwell/298338-henrik-ojaama-couldnt-hit-a-barn-door-in-motherwell-trial/

First insinuation I've seen in any match report so far that the sending off might have been even remotely harsh: "Even when Keith Lasley was red-carded just five minutes after the break for his second tackle from behind on Ian Black, that delicate flower of the Hearts midfield, it made not a jot of difference to the outcome." (Today's Rancid.)

Naw, but Google can