David

I've seen the "cheap option again" patter trotted out a few times now, with Kettlewell and Hammell before him. Here's my question. What does that mean? I can understand fans saying that when it's a club owned by a rich individual or whatever, and they're not keen on throwing away millions on a manager, but that's not where we're at. What benefit would the board draw from sacrificing the right candidate to save a few quid? Why would we go for "the cheap option?"

I've seen the mention of agents being involved, which will obviously be the case, but it's worth remembering that the agents work for the player. Not the other way around. More often than not the agent is portrayed as the bad guy (or girl) when a player moves, a role they're happy to accept as it protects their client, but make no mistake, no player goes anywhere against their will. It's the players call, and the players families call.

Yeah, I really hope we do.

He is playing. I just pointed out that he's started five of a possible eight games, and has played a role in every game since his return. I could understand the concern if we'd brought him back and he'd sat on the bench as an unused substitute, or had played ten minutes here or there for the majority of those games but that's not the case. We've played four games in two weeks. He's started two of them. And in the two he was a substitute he came on after 27 minutes and 45 minutes. It's not about how well he's been playing, it's about game time management. It happens at lots of clubs, and especially with younger players where the impetus is in bringing them on but not burning them out. I guarantee that if he keeps performing as he is we'll see him start more and more games as the season goes on.

I could understand that line of thinking if he sees more bench time than starts in the coming weeks and months. I wasn't meaning you in my reply by the way, as it was others who were saying it beggars belief that Johnston has been benched a few times. I think starting five out of eight since his return isn't too bad in all honesty, and will hopefully increase as the season progresses. He's only turned 19 I think, and I'm sure the coaching staff will be keeping a close eye on him to ensure that he's given the correct amount of game time and isn't "overplayed" to any extent. On the contract front we should absolutely be doing all we can to get him tied down on a deal that reflects his position as the future in his position.

I sometimes wonder if fans think our management teams heads button up the back. Do you not think that Hammell etc knew Johnston is a good player? Who was it that sanctioned his early return to the club last month? He's been involved in eight games since he returned, starting five and coming off the bench in three. As has been mentioned, you don't just chuck young players in there and have them play every single game. Johnston has had plenty of game time since his return.

Even the great Jurgen Klopp has been "found out" so it happens to the best of them. I'd still rather a manager who does well enough to eventually get found out than a manager who doesn't do well enough to even reach that point.

And with good reason. The very fact that no one else in the bottom six has conceded less goals than us is in large part down to Kelly. Throw in the absolute dugshit defences he's been playing behind and that fact becomes even more noteworthy. We've seen enough from him to know that he's solid enough 95% of the time. Now isn't the time to try out another keeper to see if he's any good or not.

They did do okay. It's only once Kettlewell was handed the reigns on his own that the wheels came off. If you look at his record there as sole manager it was very similar to Hammell's. Both had around six months in the job, both of them won the same amount of games in that timeframe, and their winning percentage was quite similar (25% for Hammell and 29% for Kettlewell). The only difference was Kettlewell was bumped when County were four points adrift at the bottom. I've seen a few folk commenting on how he came across in that press conference. I'll tell you what, I saw Graham Alexander described as "arrogant" but Kettlewell managed to outdo him by some margin. When a manager says three times in 15 minutes "not to sound arrogant here..." you know he fancies himself as a top coach. The only difference, of course, is that Kettlewell has pretty much fuck-all by way of a record to back up such an attitude. Alexander had an arrogance about him, and his football was dire to watch, but his overall career win percentage is 43%, and he's guided two teams to promotion and reached a play-off and cup final down south. Plus guided us to a top six finish and European football. Remember those heady days? 👀

The problem there is that the manager we'd perhaps want to try to bring us back up maybe isn't the same manager we'd want to take us into another premiership campaign if we avoid the drop.

We're just one of a few teams this season who aren't performing. We've replaced good and decent players with others who aren't as good. In the past we were lucky enough to be able to identify players who were within our budget, and who fit together well as a team and who managed to stay relatively fit for much of the season. While luck alone certainly doesn't determine who stays up and who goes down, it does play a part. This season we've missed the likes of Jake Carroll, Bevis Mugabi, Nathan McGinley, and Joe Efford through injury for long spells. We signed Moult which didn't work out, and we've signed both Blaney and Mandron who almost immediately got injured. A lot of that is down to bad luck, probably coupled with questions over our fitness and coaching staff, but it's all been factors in where we are this season. If you listen to Callum Davidson talking last season when St Johnstone were facing a relegation scrap he talked at length about injuries, bad luck and so on. No team finds themselves in our position without those aspects being a factor. I've seen people talking about an experienced manager being the answer. Derek McInnes and Malky Mackay are two of the more experienced and savvy operators in the league yet they're down here alongside us fighting it out for survival. There is no singular and simple answer to this. It's a mixture of different factors that all clubs who find themselves in a relegation battle face.

And in the process let him live out his "arrogant fantasy" remember.

Much like sticking with Alexander to when we did was a mistake. I said we should have either parted ways in the summer, or stuck with him until around December to see how we would do. We're now on the verge of making the same mistake with Hammell. We either should have changed direction before the January window, or stick with him the rest of the season. Allowing him to bring in seven players to suit how he wants to play then binning him will be a disaster. There's no other option.

One thing I would say is that anyone we brought in to replace Hammell at this stage probably wouldn't be the man to bring us back up either, which then means we'd be looking at potentially four managers in two seasons, which isn't a great look. As mentioned, it's one thing being a team that's not good enough and gets relegated, but it's entirely another thing being a team that's not good enough and that's burning through managers at a rate of knots. That kind of instability will have a knock-on effect elsewhere, including recruitment. If you're the manager at a club like Brighton or Leeds, are you sending players like McKinstry or Furlong up to a club where the manager who brings them in and agrees to give them minutes might not be the guy in charge within a few weeks or months? That stability as a club has always worked in our favour. Would an Ollie Crankshaw or Riku Danzaki still be as keen to come here if they thought the manager who convinced them to come and who said they were in his plans might get binned and replaced with someone who doesn't fancy them within a matter of weeks? Football is unpredictable at the best of times, but if we start looking like a club who parts ways with managers days before the season starts, and who sacks managers literally days or weeks after they sign seven players in a transfer window it could cause us issues down the road.

Agreed. One thing I have taken solace in thus far is that we've never really looked like an absolute shambles the way Aberdeen have. They look like a lost cause, losing by 5 and 6 goals at a time, being smacked around by Darvel etc. We've been losing games by the odd goal most times, and until the St Johnstone game I've never really seen us in a game this season with the exception of the old firm where I've thought we looked well beaten. But, as you say, if we go to Aberdeen and repeat the St Johnstone performance it could be trouble. I'm fairly sure though that if Hammell goes we're as good as down.

We tend to play better away from home (take from that what you will) so I'm certainly far more confident of getting something here than I would be if the game was at Fir Park.

Sadly, yes. Unless there's an outstanding candidate out there who for some reason isn't working, and would be affordable, I don't see the point in binning Hammell. With our current financial situation I could see someone like Kettlewell being given the job, and I don't see the point in replacing one manager who has had less than six months in the job and a sub-30% win rate with a manager who had less than six months in the Ross County job before being bumped when they were four points adrift and had a sub-30% win rate. I've seen so many ludicrous suggestions over the past few days from fans, ranging from bringing in an 82 year old Craig Brown or Craig Levein, to basically telling Hammell that he's shit at his job by forcing him to accept a new number two who's more experienced. It's an absolute shitshow, but we are where we are because of the decisions made, and we need to live with them now. I've constantly said that binning any manager literally days before the new league campaign kicked off was absolute madness, but that's what we did. The only thing that would match that would be bringing in his replacement, letting him approve seven January signings, then sacking him right after that. What we need to do now is stick with the plan. Hammell has been backed in the window. His new signings will need time to get up to speed, which may be time we don't have, but that's just how it is. We now live or die by the decision to appoint him. What I'd also say is that there is virtually no time in football history where appointing three different managers in one season has seen success follow. That usually brings issues of its own, and at that point you're sliding from a club having a bad season to a club that is moving into basket case territory. That kind of volatility in the board room can have a knock-on effect on which players and managers we can attract in future. We already saw one player come in on the basis that Alexander was his manager and his career basically grind to a halt. Do we want another manager to come in who possibly doesn't fancy some of the new signings we've made and a similar thing to happen? Nah, we need to stay the course now. We've appointed Hammell, we've made moves in the window. Now we need to let it play out.

This is key, and most relevant to discussion in the present moment. Those saying we should bin off yet another manager this season are mental. Hammell was always going to need this January window at the very minimum, with a proper pre-season and summer to really put his stamp on things. We simply cannot judge the guy after less than six months in the job, especially when it's not even his team yet.

Two points/questions then we can either revisit the Alexander thread or leave it be: I've seen a few people claim that he left his job. But I've also seen it claimed that he's still being paid by the club to sit home and do nothing, and that this is the case until either his contract term is complete or he gets a new job. If this is the case then he almost certainly didn't leave the position of his own accord, as he would most likely be due nothing if he quit. That's why we see managers up and down the country hanging onto their jobs when they're well past their welcome. They want sacked because then they get a payoff that they wouldn't get if they quit. So, which is it? Does anyone actually know? Finally, I've said it numerous times already on this forum. The time to sack him or for him to leave was the end of the previous season. If the club weren't interested in that option then we should have run with him until about November and seen if he could turn it around. Like most other clubs would have. If we're still not happy, we remove him and bring in someone else just ahead of the January window. Parting company with him literally days before the new season kicked off was an absolute shambles of the highest order, and is at least partly responsible for the position we find ourselves in now. And for the record, that entire pre-season was a total farce. We were having work done to our pitch which curtailed our ability to schedule home friendlies, and apparently a number of the friendly games we had scheduled to play away from home were cancelled quite late on. I don't know who's fault that was, but I doubt it was the job of the manager to be on the phones arranging pre-season friendlies. We went into our European games with two friendlies under our belt. Two. Nowhere near enough to be able to compete with a team that was, at that time, five months deep into their season. Yes, it's League of Ireland but the gulf in class between us and them isn't so great as to allow us to come in cold pre-season with two kick-abouts under our belt. And I actually disagree with your final point. I think if Alexander had been kept on we'd be in a better position than we are now. He's a more experienced operator than Hammell, and while he did sign Morris, he also signed Spittal and McGinn, and was part of the process that saw Van Veen sign a new deal, so there was positive moves made in that summer. Of course the football would still be eye-bleeding stuff to watch and no doubt how he dressed and his "arrogance" would still be annoying to certain people, but I'd be far more confident of us avoiding the drop with someone like Alexander at the helm than Hammell. Just my own personal opinion, mind.

Especially when those same people giving him abuse are usually the ones who bang on about "all I want is a player who gives 100% for the shirt" which is exactly what Shields did.

It's called nonsense.

You realise that your whole "Alexander living out his fantasy" stuff is really weird, right? You initially said that "the club is now financially crippled because they let Alexander live his arrogant fantasy" when someone mentioned some of our players being signed on long-term contracts. Do you honestly believe that it was Alexander who dictated that we start offering longer term deals to players who the club believed may have some sell-on value? That was clearly a direction that the board wanted to move in to try and put an end to the constant rebuilding of the team every summer. A decision that was widely applauded by the fans who were getting fed up seeing us sign someone on a one year deal only for them to do well then piss off sharpish for nothing. Sure, Alexander was given a contract extension at the wrong time, but he'd have been a total fool not to accept it. As for what cost him his job, it wasn't anything to do with "stubborn hubris." I understand that his self-confidence seems to rub you the wrong way for some bizarre reason, but guess what? You need to have a level of self confidence, or dare I say arrogance to be a football manager at this level. He lost his job because the club panicked after we lost in Europe and the fans went mental. Absolutely a mistake, considering we were days away from the league season starting. And we're paying the price for that now. Yeah, but we didn't pay a transfer fee, which is something we got when he left for United eventually. Bottom line is, we got a player who most had low expectations of and managed to get a decent run out of them. It was a deal that certainly paid off for the club, and for the player financially. Wait, what? You read Hammell saying that he had a conversation with the media team who mentioned some names we're being linked with in the press, and that some of the players mentioned were not on our radar as somehow meaning our Head of Recruitment isn't dealing in transfer business? I'm interested to hear you break down the thought process behind that one!

I'm not sure why you're still banging on about this "Alexander living out his fantasy" guff. That was addressed a while back. Here's a question for you, why should Tony Watt or any other player show loyalty to any club? All you need to do is read back through this thread to see how fans act when a player isn't performing. We show them zero loyalty, so I don't know why we should expect it in return. If you actually look at it, we got him for nothing, he provided a decent level of performance and goal return while he was here, signed not one but two contract extensions, then when he left we got money for him. In short, he owed us absolutely nothing. He was paid to do a job, which is what he did. He then moved on when another employer offered him considerably more to do the same job.

We all know the reason. Money. And to be quite honest, who wouldn't have done the same? If he's willing to come back, the manager fancies bringing him in and we have the finances then I say we go for it. We need goals, and he showed last time with us that he can score goals.

Okay, so that's one of those sides then who last went down 14 years ago. What about the others? My point is, we're a club with a small fanbase. It's not unthinkable that we could end up being relegated. Bigger clubs than us have went down in the past twenty years, so it could happen. And if it does, we just need to readjust our financial planning to suit. Unless, of course, there's a multi-millionaire out there who's willing to chuck some money at us and not see any real return? If that's the the case then happy days!