Ya Bezzer!

Fuck! I think I just tried to convince myself that I had three games left to go to this season instead of just two. Oh no! Just two more games.

My initial reaction to this thread title is "OH NO NOT AGAIN!". Dundee Utd at Fir Park is the stuff of nightmares. However, perhaps 120 minutes of high tempo football at the weekend will mean they are a wee bit leggy and we will have a bit more in the tank. By the way Dundee Utd are the only team to beat us at Fir Park in the league since Hibs beat us on 26th October 2012. Unfortunately they have managed it twice.

Hopefully common sense applies now and we get the good reforms with the bad tossed out. SPL playoffs, stadium restrictions lifted, financial pie shared more fairly, etc.

I think there are some genuinely altruistic reasons for this reconstruction because professional football out with the top division is becoming unsustainable but at the end of the day I can see this descending into farce if it gets the go ahead. We are fooling ourselves if we think by desperate fire fighting every few years we can maintain Scottish football at it's current levels. I'd compare it to gardening. You have to prune to get new growth and that's what Scottish football has to do. Football clubs must learn to live on money that they generate themselves and not be held hostage by television companies. If that means lower wages, capped squad sizes, part time football, one year contracts etc, etc then that's what we should do. We need to be in a position where clubs can actually invest in their infrastructure and we cannot do that when we are hanging on grimly for survival. The key is to ensure every club is profitable. Slicing the pie so that clubs artificially survive on hand outs from governing bodies is fundamentally flawed. The crisis now is a financial crisis, it is not one of set up. We are trying to fix a headache with a bandage.

Does it? Last season the top five non OF goal scorers scored significantly fewer goals (Jon Daly 19 Francisco Sandaza 14, Steven Thompson 13, Garry O'Connor 12, Dean Shiels 12) so would you say that signified a much stronger league last term than this term?

Did a bit of research with the help of some folks over at Pie and Bovril. Here's a list of non Old Firm players who have scored 20+ goals in a season since the the beginning of the Premier League. 1975/76 - Willie Pettigrew (Motherwell) 22 1976/77 - Andy Ritchie (Morton) 22 1979/80 - Doug Somner (St.Mirren) 25 1982/83 - Davie Dodds (Dundee Utd) 22 1984/85 - Frank McDougall (Aberdeen) 22 1985/86 - John Robertson (Hearts) 20 1987/88 - John Robertson (Hearts) 26 1987/88 - Tommy Coyne (Dundee) 33 1992/93 - Duncan Shearer (Aberdeen) 22 2004/05 - Derek Riordan (Hibernian) - 20 2009/10 - Anthony Stokes (Hibernian) - 21 2012/13 - Billy Mackay (Inverness) - 20* 2012/13 - Leigh Griffiths (Hibernian) - 20* 2012/13 - MIchael Higdon (Motherwell) - 22* * with 5 games of season remaining. It's perhaps a little ambitious to expect Michael Higdon to score 12 more goals and break Tommy Coyne's record but could he match John Robertson's 26? One more goal overhauls Willie Pettigrew's record.

I think Rangers would be more interested in him than Celtic. Celtic sign promising up and comers and sell them on at a huge margin. They couldn't do that with McFadden. Rangers on the other hand have cherry picked some of the best players in the league by paying huge fortunes in wages that otherwise those players would not have received. They might do that with McFadden. I'm not sure McFadden having played in the Championship and Premiership would want to go to that level of football but if he's offered a three year contract of 12 grand a week then that has proved to quite persuasive.

I think one more win would probably get us European football, Ross County have lost their good run and three on the trot and St. Johnstone have a very good home record but they don't win often away from home. After a wee wobble Inveress are in some good form again, the match against them post split is going to be massive.

He is not a defender, he's much better going forward. I don't mind him filling in for Hammell if he's injured but long term I don't think his future is at left back.

Few good performances, few good in patches and a few didn't quite fire on all cylinders. Thought Randolph and Lasley had very good matches but it has to be James McFadden.

Thought we were the better team today, slightly, although we weren't quite firing on all cylinders. However, it was a tale of the return of the shaky defence again, nothing much could be done about the first goal but the second one was a bit of a shocker and there were a few other examples where we were a bit lucky to get away with it. Randolph was excellent today although he didn't have too many direct shoots to deal with but the way he comes out and takes balls from players feet is superb. Someone like Graeme Smith would probably given away about three penalties in similar circumstances. What can you say about McFadden. I don't think he was even on top form today and yet he's just a million miles ahead of everyone else.

Kilmarnock have a game in hand at home, then play the bottom team in the league and and have what looks like an unassailable goal difference (unless something bizarre happens) so you'd have to imagine they are strong favourites. Hibs haven't won an away match in the league since November so 3 points at Celtic Park seems unlikely and Aberdeen and Dundee Utd play each other so only one of them can win.

To be fair to the naysayers there was a time, this season, when Higdon's effect on the match was negligable, our home form rotten, exacerbated by a toothless attack, and we were sitting about 8th in the league. I've never been a critic of Higdon, at least overall he did has some individual stinkers, but at least in those circumstances there was some logic to the criticism. Now I don't see how anyone could criticise him and to be honest I've not seen anyone do so. Just as Sutton's game developed a lot over a couple of seasons and he was contributing a lot more than just goals to the team latterly, I think Higdon's game has come on a lot since the beginning of this season. Earlier in the season if Higdon wasn't scoring he wasn't doing anything. Now that's not the case and he's consistently one of our better players in general play, even putting aside the goals tally. Right now I'd rate Higdon more highly than Sutton, so in that respect I've changed my mind, but Sutton was good over a longer period. I'd like to think Higdon will be here for another season and this time next term when comparing the two it will be a none contest!

I remember Ian Ferguson doing that. Maybe Brown did it as well. Or maybe I'm confused.

We struggled against a poor Dundee side of earlier in the season. Now that they have picked up a bit with Brown coming in maybe the opposite will happen and we'll thump them. However Dundee have drawn three of their last four and I can see a similar result at the weekend.

Always gets good comments during Open All Mics on Radio Scotland from whoever is watching the game.

Randolph came with the best reputation you can have. The fans of his former club were disgusted he'd been allowed to leave. It's not true at all that Randolph had no reputation before he arrived here. He was highly rated when he was signed.

Carswell has shown a bit more recently but in my opinion, even if he has the potential to be a first team stick on player that's at least another season away. We simply cannot go into a full season depending on guys like Carswell to maintain our recent standing. The same goes for Hollis. If he does start next season as first choice goalkeeper we will still have to bring in a 2nd choice to act as serious competition for the first team place. Releasing Steve Saunders baffles me unless his injuries have finished him. He's a better tackler and better in the air than any other defender we have excluding Hutchinson.

Sad news. My condolences.

I agree and I said at the time of the Rangers debacle that we had to move away from the current financial model. Right now Scottish football is televisions bitch on a leash. It throw us enough scraps to keep things ticking over but not enough to ever free ourselves from potential crisis. The Norwegian league pulled in a television deal worth THREE TIMES the Scottish deal and the Swedish deal was similar to the Norwegian one. If these countries can make those kind of deals why can't we? It seems to me we sell our game off very cheaply. It's one thing to have a television deal that's financially empowering but our recent deals are basically bare minimum survival fund. I'd suggest we either get a decent deal at the sort of rate similar level leagues seem to be capable of producing in Europe or we scale back and reduce costs. It wasn't that long ago semi professional or part time teams played at the 1st and 2nd tier levels and the level of football was as good if not better than it is now. As an example just look at the 1986 Scotland World Cup squad. It included players that came through at Airdrie, Partick Thistle, Dumbarton, Ayr United, East Stirlingshire etc.

I'd been going to games regularly for about 5 seasons when we won the cup. 22 seasons later I'm still waiting for a follow up. It was a great day, an amazing day but I definitely didn't appreciate just how great or how amazing. Sometimes I wonder if it will ever happen again in my life time but at least I did get to experience it once. I really do hope that we win it again so that fans younger than me get that opportunity but just look at Hibernian!

I've never understood the antipathy towards the League Cup. It's basically the same teams in a cup format. You could actually say because the early rounds are seeded, the top teams get a bye and there are no replays that it's harder to actually win that the League Cup than the Scottish Cup.

David Kelly scored 9 goals in 26 appearances for the Republic of Ireland. Said Chiba scored 5 goals in 40 appearances for Morocco. Pat Nevin scored 5 goals in 28 appearances for Scotland.

Europe is good to have but I don't see how anyone would prefer 4 games, 4 defeats, 0 goals scored to actually winning some silverware. Perhaps actually qualifying for the Champions League group stages or even the Europa group stages but frankly that's not very likely.

To be honest I think "golden era" is a bit OTT, I don't see how you can really describe a period where we haven't won a thing as a "golden era" but perhaps it's a "silver era" and it's certainly been a better than average period. When I started coming to games regularly it was that very difficult period when we'd just been promoted and we were trying to establish ourselves in the Premier League and it was a bit of a brutal slog season on season until McLean eventually managed to fashion a side that could do better than being perennial relegation strugglers. What the historians will probably say was that the city clubs of Scotland over this period have been absolutely abject.