weeyin

If Sky agreed, nobody else would get a meaningful say anyway.

With a minimum of 6 cameras and the build up for all goals scored to be checked, you'd have to think offside will be looked at.

I'd add Gregor Stevens to that list.

Delighted... for Jack Ross. Their chairman's statement says: "“Our hope in appointing Shaun Maloney as a young, highly regarded coach was that he would help us take the club forward, but ultimately it didn't work out." Just in case sacking Ross (10 days before they played in a cup final) wasn't sufficient evidence the chairman is clueless, he thought a new coach would make a significant impact in 120 days.

If we need to choose between getting papped out of Europe by a wee team or papped out the regional League Cup group by a wee team, we get more money for a Europap.

Agreed. After years of practise, I'm pretty good at avoiding or ignoring all things OF related.

The CL has all sorts of weird rules baked in to ensure the big boys get more than they deserve. They're trying to confirm a rule change where teams that don't qualify at all get to play if they have a "high historic coefficient ranking". It's just a backdoor effort to rebuild the European Superleague, but it gets closer every day. As people will know from my posts, I'm no fan of the Old Firm, but I still think it's ridiculous that the Champions from our league have to go through more qualification rounds than teams that finish 4th in the EPL. Again, it's all about protecting the wealthy and making sure they get richer while sporting fairness and integrity becomes a distant memory.

I think you're right. It would likely maintain or boost our coefficient for future seasons, but no more than that. I think we are at our max for Euro spots. I don't see it happening though.

Aye, as long as Hibs don't win the Scottish Cup then top 5 will get a Euro spot of some kind.

Is it true they only considered him for the job because he was born after our infamous 1977 cup tie victory?

From sparky to C-Level executive. Not too shabby.

I've been seeing that rumour for a while. Certainly be a great opportunity for Las, but a bit weird for Robbo to have him has a new boss.

If you follow that approach you'll just end up with technically excellent, tactically astute football players. Don't want any of that nonsense near Scottish Football!

Whoever we bring in, the one guarantee is that there will be people on here posting they're not good enough after 45 mins of game time.

The Hibs gaffer was assistant to our ex-player managing the Belgian national team - the number one ranked team in the world for most of that period. Not been too impressive in the Easter Road hot-seat so far.

Completely agree! I remember an interview he gave early on about the adjustments he had to make after his early experiments. Basically giving up the short passing from our box and letting Kelly play it longer. I think he ended up being over reliant on Kelly's long ball in a number of games when we could be playing more through Slattery, Goss, Maguire or whoever.

The old, "kill the spontaneous goal celebration until after the VAR check by which time it's either too late or it's been disallowed" rule.

To be fair to GA, he started off his Motherwell career by trying to play out short from the back and quickly discovered we didn't have players capable of doing that. It was only after that he started going longer - arguably too long, but I'm not sure whether that's preference or realism.

Unfortunately, "benefit of the doubt" is given by the officials rather than VAR. VAR just gives them pictures to make poor decisions.

If he has an IQ higher than his shirt number, probably aye.

Overall, I'm more against VAR than for it. It will be the same pool of officials we've had over the past few years that are in control of the video, so the cynic in me expects an increase in the number of OF pen reviews while the rest of us don't see any change. The main reason for it was supposed to be to overturn "clear and obvious" errors. For me, that means if you can't tell in about 10 seconds that there was a mistake, then it wasn't clear and obvious. However, that rarely seems to be the case, and VAR reviews often stop the game for a minute or more. I also agree about the offside decisions. If you need 2 minutes to figure out if a striker's shoulder is 0.5cm ahead of the defender's big toe then the goal should stand. Partly because goals are good for the game and partly because video technology, by its nature, is inaccurate. You can never freeze it the exact nanosecond the ball leaves a player's foot, so it's not fair to try and apply that accuracy to the offside line. If it's used to correct the decision like Livi's non-penalty the other week, I have no issues with that. Likewise, if it's used to identify off the ball incidents or even review bad tackles that the ref has missed or where he's been unsighted that's OK by me. The rest, I don't really care about. I'm happy to be proved wrong, but I fear with the standard of officials we have in the SPFL the only thing VAR will bring Scottish football is more wrong decisions that interrupt the flow of the game.

That's probably what they actually do. The official line I've heard from the SPFL, however, is that they do try and predict top 6 before every season and how that complicates things. Right enough, it's usually when they are a week late with the post-split fixtures and looking for an excuse.

You could sell that as a slogan to our Marketing Team

They have to predict who will finish top 6 before the season starts to try and schedule the last 5 fixtures to balance home and away, plus take into account previous home and away balance. I think Hibs and Aberdeen really shafted them with that, which is why we end up at Tannadice again.

I agree Lamie has been our best defensive performer recently. I was one of his defenders (no pun intended) in his early days because we were playing him in all kinds of weird positions - including left mid at one point. He's obviously an effective central defender. Not outstanding, but solid enough. Part of that effectiveness is finding a partner, and we've struggled to field the same duo in consecutive games most weeks. A settled defensive unit is a key platform in any team's success and we're not there yet. Sol reminds me a bit of McManus. Has the talent, but prone to lapses in concentration a couple of times a game. Bevis is a bit like Hartley. Keep the passes short and simple, and he does fine. But you've got to love it when he's on the move up the wing and he seems like a top bloke.