fizoxy

I know we didn’t have much to do with it, and we almost screwed it up, but getting money for Hastie looks like some piece of business at this point. He desperately needs a run of games at a lower level, as he has the attributes to be a good player, and has shown what he’s capable of when on form, but that Rangers move has set him back years as a player. The money will be nice for him, but that isn’t going to last much longer. as for the winter signings, I can only assume we either wanted 11 to play against in training or needed more bodies for painting the stand.

I’m trying to schedule meetings at work so that I don’t get tempted to watch this one. Think I’m going to just ignore it for blood pressure reasons. We’ll do hibs on Saturday. That’s the kind of thing hibs do.

Just a reminder in case anyone didn’t notice, Hastie played the last ten minutes.

Our recruitment has been poor, but the injury/illness list is killing us. I'm worried about whatever grimshaw has, that's a long time out for an illness. Hopefully Campbell shakes his off soon. Hard to give anyone pass marks after that. It was good to see Johnstone get a full 90 mins. He was shaky and was one of the worst culprits for giving the ball away, but we hardly set him up to succeed. He did look quick and played the position well, so hopefully he can continue to push for a place. 3 up front doesn't work. Its embarrassing that we played most of the game with 3 strikers and managed one shot. Cole is really frustrating as despite the work he puts in, the ball just bounces off him half of the time. I'm not sure what the solution is, but surely we need to try something else? Also, I understand that the manager wants to persevere with his ideas, but we clearly do not have the players to play the ball out from the back, and this situation isn't the right time to try and force this onto technically poor players.

Are we allowed terracing in the championship?

We really went out of our way to give them the 2nd goal, offside or no. How we managed to keep it this respectable at half time I don't know. I was hoping we could use our stored good luck to get some points, but it seems we're using it up just to avoid total drubbings. Hopefully Johnstone settles and gets the chance to attack some and show what he can do. We really need some positive injury news soon, this is dire.

Maybe the club doesn't want to publically tip off other clubs as to potential selection? In the past the injury update would be a quick blurb at the end of a press interview, so I'm not sure if what we have now is much worse. It is weird that were not hearing much about our new guys though. With them all being temporary recruits I can see why not much effort has been put in to marketing them, but it's been total silence since the pics of them being interrupted from looking at their shoes.

Fair play to Ricki Lamie for being the best at not being injured.

Some good interviews with the Ugandan prince and Mr. Motivator, and Flow talks about paint.

I've looked at the historic data and crunched the numbers, and I reckon that we will lose the ones I thought we would win, win the ones I thought we'd lose, and a draw.

The virus screwed clubs and businesses. There will be a lot of hindsight and revisionist history thrown at this for political purposes, but to me the idea of having lots of people in close contact for the best part of two hours every week doesn't seem like a good idea when you're trying to limit the deadliness of a virus and its strain on our healthcare system. It hit us bad enough when we took measures to mitigate the spread, so I can't imagine what would have happened if we had just let it spread. Heard immunity through vaccination is indeed a way out of this, and luckily some clever folk managed to create a bunch of successful vaccines in less than a year, and we're seeing it being rolled now, so hopefully next season we can get back to something like normal. Which would be nice since I plan to get a season ticket since I'll hopefully be back home.

Might have been a different game if we took those two early chances from corners, but overall we got what we deserved. We didn't win any individual battles, and it's hard to give anyone pass marks. The forwards put in a great shift, but we were barely a threat. I assume Johnstone came on to audition for the start in the next game with Odonnell being out, it will be interesting to see if he gets the chance. Hopefully Gallagher will be for for Saturday if he starts training on monday. The post split bottom six is going to be a free for all, not really anything in it right now.

Fair play to Cole and Watt, they could easily have gone through the motions, but have worked hard the whole game and made us look not totally incompetent.

Not much different to the first half against killie, but with accies actually taking advantage of our poor play. Can't argue with the penalty or the red, sometimes those get missed, but we weren't that lucky. Despite how bad we've been, we should have scored from two free headers from corners, criminal to miss those. We should have made the change after the sending off, sticking with 3 up made no sense. At least we get to see one of the new guys for a bit.

I like Maguire, I was more coming from his lack of involvement prior to this run, and the likelihood that if it wasn’t for injuries and swearing he might not have had a look in.

Killie were well up for the game, and for most of the game looked the better team up until the final delivery. However, they rarely got in behind us, and they generated mostly half chances, while we had 3 clear cut chances to score despite our disjointed play. As said elsewhere in this thread, we've been on the other end of games like this this season, so it was nice to see us turn that around. Everybody worked hard in difficult conditions, and it's great to see Campbell get on the scoresheet again and Lamie and Mugabi having another solid game.

I went with Lamie. He's essentially the one keeping a place warm for someone else, but despite his fondness for a mishap we have kept it tight in the run of games where he started. He was solid tonight alongside Bevis, and they both handled just about everything thrown into the box. It is amazing that our settled winning XI contains Lamie, Mugabi, Crawford and Maguire.

It's a great opportunity for him, he can use the plastic as an excuse every other game.

He's going to get them fired up to get revenge for us choosing Alexander over him by getting some St. Johnstone fans to talk about how great he is over zoom.

I don't like to spend too much time on the root cause analysis for every goal we concede, because on one side we have us blaming someone for losing their man and other the other side the attacker is praised for finding space. Attackers will always have the advantage when it comes to movement on and off the ball. Lamie isn't a great player, and is a liability with the ball at his feet, but it's a bit much to attribute the 2 goals we lost to Celtic to him alone. There's plenty of positives to take from the game, particularly how we had them on the ropes at the end. It's good to see a settled front 3 too, and hopefully Cole isn't cited for his kick. It will be interesting to see how we set up if we do lose him. My guess would be a straight swap for Smith. I enjoyed watching carrol and o'donnell pull down those pinged balls out to the touchline with ease, and their form will be key if we want to go on a decent run.

When did we decide he doesn't want to be here?

I would have liked to have seen polworth rather than Smith on for Maguire. Long and Cole ran their arses off and polworth may have been better placed to exploit their movement. I wasnt at all impressed by Roberts, he's fast but looked very rusty. Lamie avoided major blunders, and overall the defence was pretty comfortable after they sussed Turnbull out in the first half. We were pretty composed throughout the game and had some good passages of play when we did have the ball. I thought the fullbacks were excellent. We lacked a killer touch throughout the game. We so often made a good interception, or created an opening, to then screw it up with a lazy pass. Both Maguire and Crawford were guilty on a few occasions of being careless when we just needed them to take the extra touch. Overall I can't complain. I expected us to struggle, and I thought it was going to be embarrassing after that early goal, but we stayed organized and stuck to our plan, and in the end it was luck that saved Celtic.

So unlucky in the end, thought that one had just creeped in. Great performance to almost turn that around, when earlier in the season we would have collapsed after the first goal, never mind the second. Without seeing it back, and based on how our season has gone, I expect that the ball was about a yard over the line.

Alexander just needs to print out the match stats and pin it to the changing room wall. That's how you motivate players.

It looked like a stonewall penalty live, but the replay shows it just outside the box. Nice work by long to win it. After that start we've restricted them to few chances, and started to look a bit more comfortable in the ball. We probably shouldn't still be in the game, but we are, so no complaints at this point.