DFC1974

Gordon Jizzum...or is that a bit too difficult to swallow?

Nicky Banger and Mash

Lee Powerade

I've heard about a scheme like this in a sort of investment type capacity (maybe Hearts?) whereby if the player is sold, a chunk of the transfer fee goes back to the investment group who pay the fiver a month. Unless I picked it up all wrong of course.

The idea of block capitals in a copy/paste template is so that you don’t forget to fill in the blanks! 😜

Close one between Berra and Hemmings for me. Hemmings gets the nod though. Great performances from Meekings, Forster and Byrne also!

Stroll in the park. I think Berra provided a much needed calming influence at the back which let Meekings and Forster show their qualities. Been a while since we’ve looked so assured at the back.

Not sure what planet he was on let alone what game he was watching. Fortunately no harm done to us but imo that was a poor performance.

I'd probably add Declan Gallagher. Released after we gained promotion and replaced with Konrad who was not an improvement at all and subsequent replacements since Konrad have snowballed from disaster to disaster since.

Aberdeen?

You’ve posted that pic of Ryan Inniss shouting at Jordan Jones as ‘evidence’ of the players fighting for McCann’s cause on a number of occasions. I fail to see the connection? I was shouting at Jordan Jones for being a diving tw*t but it certainly wasn’t for McCann’s benefit. It might just be that Inniss was pissed that Jones had cost his chances of getting a win bonus or, more likely, that it is just a natural reaction? (Incidentally, I’ll add Wighton to the list of players that might not have seen eye-to-eye with McCann). If players were downing tools against teams like Livi when they should’ve been giving their all to impress a new manager then, imo, that speaks more volume about their individual professionalism rather than their body language. Besides, even if the players were giving McCann 110% every week because they respected him so much, the simple fact of the matter was that most of them were appalling footballers and McCann was an appalling manager. We were in a tail-spin, despite the solitary ugly win against the Accies, and we are still feeling the pain of it now. Our chances of staying up were, imo, already dead. It’s just that McIntyre put the nail in the coffin rather than being able to revive us. We could’ve kept McCann to save us a fortune in pay offs for a lost cause and then sacked him when the inevitable happened but of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing! In your opinion, what lessons should we have learned from McCann’s sacking that we can use to handle McPake’s current situation? I think there are a numerous comparisons between the situations the 2 rookie managers are/were in. I’m with @Prince Buster that we are too far gone in this season to sack McPake now but I also understand and respect your view that October was too early to sack McCann.

The timing of McCann sacking was probably 2 weeks too late but I wouldn’t say it was atrocious. It still gave any new manager time to give the squad a clean slate to assess their abilities up until the January window and then identify targets where he felt changes were needed. OK, we can’t legislate the disaster that followed, but the task in hand was enormous for any manager, let alone an incompetent DAB. If I recall correctly, the ‘fine win’ against Hamilton was more about ‘fine margins’ in that we rode our luck whilst Accies rued numerous missed opportunities that would have even made El Baktouhi cringe. Swings and roundabouts v Killie - they missed a penalty too. Could’ve quite easily have scored the legit one and missed the dive one. That Killie game and the Aberdeen one under McCann that season were our only real semi-decent performances by that stage (better than the Accies win imo) yet we conceded 3 penalties between both games. Jordan Jones or not, that’s quite telling of how capable we were of being responsible for our own undoing. How do we know the players were not crying out for change? They are hardly going to go to the press and say they are not happy with the manager. Let’s not forget, McCann to this point had alleged busts up with Bain, O’Dea, Haber, Waddle and Caulker. I’m also quite sure there was suggestions that he didn’t see eye-to-eye with Holt either while Scott Allen couldn’t wait to jump ship. He dropped (unfairly) Parrish for Hamilton and then within a few weeks dropped Hamilton for Parrish. I’m also sure McCann publicly hung Moussa out to dry and dropped him after his Ayr United debacle in the cup. Whilst some of these actions are justified (Caulker - if rumours were true, Hamilton and Moussa), by combining them all together, I don’t think it suggests the squad were really particularly that happy with how things were being run.

I think it would take the neck of a giraffe for JH to expect Hazard to be dropped after only 2 games if he doesn’t have a stormer! It’s taken JH 18 months to put in a stormer of a shift and even then we still got pumped! The club has been more than fair to JH over the course. Yes, the timing is probably quite unfortunate but at the same time I think the change completely totally necessary.

Not really sure what that has to do with wether or not JH should have been dropped going into today’s game? However, if Hazard continues to gift goals, as JH has done on far too many occasions since his arrival, then I suspect that he will need dropping too and we’ll have a goalkeeping crisis on our hands!

Not really. I think most clubs would’ve dropped him long before now whilst others would have tried to offload him in a transfer window. His MoTM performance last week only papered over his all too frequent unreliability. We need confidence going into the last 15 or 16 games if we want to push for play off spot but unfortunately JH’s unpredictable nature creates too much uneasiness.