rocket_scientist

Read carefully. I said "if we wanted to reverse the performance trend of the last 20 years". Nobody's arguing that Kjaer and particularly Leighton wasn't fit for purpose. The manager's appointments are all the responsibility of the board. Even a Director of Football appointing a manager is the board's responsibility, as they appointed the DoF. I don't think there's any debate to be had about our performance as a club and as a business since Milne took charge. It is very dangerous to seek to mitigate the chairman's responsibility by pointing the finger at the manager. If the players aren't good enough, the manager is at fault. If the manager isn't getting results, it's the boardroom's fault. Our club has been so ineptly run for so long we didn't even understand the importance of a decent goalkeeper. One of my best mates has a ST at Smurren and being four or five years older than me, has been playing and watching for longer. He absolutely detests Langfield already, after half a season and yet some ignorant AFC webspeaksitechatters defended the incompetent fool and indeed, turn on any of us who have the audacity to say it like it is.

Watched him at 16 coming on as a sub for Stenny v. Montrose. It must have been 2007, the year I refused to watch Calderwood's tombola. He was an awesome prospect back then but something has made his career stall. Needs background checks and due diligence to ensure not yet another talented Scot who hasn't applied himself enough, possibly by off-field distractions. They even wrote an article about him in the Sunday Times when he was 16/17! We let him go at 15 of course. He was told he was "too small" by Willie Miller's "football operation".

Any football club with ambitions to succeed makes sure to recruit and retain talented footballers. "Succeed" is relative of course. For St Mirren or Sunderland, playing in the top division is success, with the hope of a rare cup win. Proof of competence as a club in the recruitment function is that transfer fees received exceed transfers spent. This takes out the "level" of division that the club is operating in and proves that the scouts, coaches and managers know what they're doing, have an eye for a footballer and the ability to develop them so that they are attractive for a bigger club paying a big fee, which the club can re-invest in their "football side of the operation", the "product", or not, according to the business plan and their specific ambitions. Any football operation worth its salt knows that a good team starts with a solid goalkeeper and defence. This season is the first for well over a decade that AFC has had a competent goalkeeper, let alone a good one. Whatever Milne's ambitions have been for our club for the last 20 years, I can't imagine that it has been successful. The results on the pitch and the solitary trophy won can't possibly have been considered a success, and the financial mismanagement resulting in a wrecked balance sheet the whole time proves failure off the pitch too, survival only having been achieved through an extraordinary intervention by an independent third party, Mr & Mrs Wm Donald. If we want to reverse the performance trend of the last 20 years, we need to have a good goalkeeper. It's pretty amazing if you think about it that this simple truth has been ignored by the board of AFC and hopefully, will not continue to be neglected when it comes to the management of Rogers. What happens with him is a great barometer of what our club really wants to do and what it wants to be.

I preferred the randomness of Royhoward.

It's also unacceptable with the firepower that they have to go to Valencia and fail to beat Gary Neville. He simply had to go after that.

As Ramon Calderon just said, they needed to bin Rafa by the 15th Jan to save the club paying two years salary to him rather than one.

Very brave of you to disclose online. Not necessarily the best outlet, a football forum, many might say but hey, you never know, someone on here might say something that can help, hopefully. For me, I'll just state the obvious, something you've heard many times before no doubt. There is no "stigma" or blame that you can attach to yourself for another's condition and ultimate suicide. Tragic as that is and perfectly understandable that you do ask yourself what you might have done differently, it is not right for you to take personal responsibility nor to feel any guilt over it. Now I'll say it in a NE way. That was a cunt of a thing to have happened and my deepest sympathies to you for having to live through a massive tragedy, one of the worst imaginable. Now I'll state the obvious again. You have to be strong and strength will come through personal understanding, particularly of your underlying issue. Now I'll quote the bible. Whoever knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything. The Gospel according to St Thomas 67 Good luck to you. Baby steps indeed, one at a time.

I'm guessing you read a funny piece recently like I did where the spoofed press blamed the SNP for everything. Wee ginger or Wings over, I'm sure I got it from.

I know what you mean. I'm on day 3 of teetotality and yet to feel great. I think it's this weather. We all feel SAD, to varying degrees. Unless you have a major illness from which you might die soon.

I thought it quite amusing that one would offer his own preference as an antidote for another, particularly as there are melancholic undercurrent themes within. Knowing the piece as well as I do, or did - listened to it often in my teens, before Torvill and Dean put it out there - and not having heard it for a very long time, it was interesting for a number of reasons. I didn't know Nicola Sturgeon was a flautist. Loved the way the drums started on the outside moving in. That toothpick baton was a laugh. Uncomfortable holding it thus surely. Don't conductors love drama? Not a very good version of it. At least three horn section fuck ups. Very poor climax. Some could learn to dress themselves better. Not used to close inspection breeds sloppiness. Which is why the overall delivery was sloppy.

It has been a strategy of mine to throw a bomb into a room and then pick the fallout. As some of you have recognised and know. It's an ISD and it works every time. I can't stand Paul Merson for the exact same reasons I can't stand Freddy Flintoff, very different reasons why I can't stand Calderwood. Being serious for a change on this serious subject, of course there is proven correlations between depleted seratonin and dopamine levels and depression so of course there is chemical imbalance in some. I saw a very good lecture by a Stanford professor on this subject, a weirdy beardy guy with brilliant lecture skills. But science doesn't have all the answers despite its ego saying that it should. Another Stanford professor, Carol Dweck is doing wonderful work on fixed and growth mindsets, some are considering the question holistically and others are examining the correlations between mental health and the food chain so when considering the questions of the nature of depression, it is clear that the jury is out. Our own government are chronically underfunding mental health and this imbalance needs to be sorted. One of my old clients' father was a retired GP who said that he wasn't equipped to do his job at the end. He was trained to deal in physiological disorders whereas a growing number of his patients were suffering psychological issues. My personal experience of depression isn't deep. Only once did my wife (30 years together this year) ever suggest I might be slightly or mildly depressed and another once or twice in my life in hindsight might I have been similarly listless. I was fortunate that it didn't last very long but enough to let me understand how joylessness can persist as a condition and how when it's black, you don't see the grey let alone the white. In retrospect, any depression I may have felt were always when I wasn't happy in work and lacked purpose, not being able to see what I wanted to be doing with sufficient clarity. I was lucky in that being an optimist, however dormant it might have been at certain times, I always trusted it and therefore trusted myself. A great exchange at the start of the film I watched tonight involved war survivors. One said that all the men who he knew had died were afraid of dying and all the survivors never considered that they would die. This could go tangentially into areas of fate and consciousness and morphic resonance and the fascinating subjects that Rupert Sheldrake and particularly Malcolm Gladwell write about but seriously, what is the nature of depression? Whilst the pharmas make big money out of it and the government continue to neglect it, I don't trust that research into this field has been as comprehensive as it should have been. They're treating the effects, the symptoms and failing to get to the core of the causes. It's not black and white, this. But where the world has no problem accepting the arbitrary and somewhat random classification of the population as binarily being an optimist or a pessimist, I feel that Dweck's work will impact on this question as it already is impacting on management, training, coaching, recruitment and education, undoubtedly for big benefits for humankind.

Wife and two daughters and the dog - 4 bitches - were in Offshore yesterday, Gibson Street I think, which they rate. In the west end, I really like Cafe Zique.

The paradox of this thread being about the ugliest side of Scottish football contrasting what I've just experienced and what we were talking about. Sky Arts just showed Lady Chatterley, a French film with subtitles. It was stunningly beautiful. There is equal beauty and ugliness in this world. It just depends what we choose to seek. It's a law of nature. Yin and Yang. Buddhism teaches this directly. Christianity does not and only alludes to it, the Catholics more so. God is good and the Devil is evil doesn't address the equality of both existing often at the same time and within the same being. Life is what we choose. There is always choice. It needs discipline to pursue it.

Sorry to hear that. Picking confrontations online wouldn't help. Ugliness isn't good for the soul. Gravitate towards love and beauty.

You sat on the thread for twenty minutes after I asked. As you well know. Spontaneity and manners never been your forte. You'll not learn so here's a hint... Post something interesting and of what you know or feel.

Which is why I posted that he was a charlatan being protected by a charlatan. Milne is many things but charlatan he isn't.

Fuck off. I'm watching the telly. And stop being pedantic. THIRD ok? We should have been going for the title of course but 3rd was the worst we should have expected.

I don't know Chow so thanks for the recommendation. The Aberdeen Manchurian is the best chinese in my opinion up here but restaurants here are shite compared to the weege. We struggle to pick anywhere to go dining out in Aberdeen and eating out a lot, we get average too often.

I never said that YOU were a fan of JC. I'm not stupid so don't imply that I am so stupid as to attribute properties to yourself that I never did. I despised the fat cunt because he was a charlatan who was stealing a wage and he directly insulted us. The fact that he was protected by another charlatan meant he felt bulletproof, and all this went on for the exact same reason. Rating him against other useless bastards is an exercise in futility, others who produced even worse records than he did because his stewardship of our club was so shite it was never going to work. I chastise anyone and everyone who fucks up my club. We have never had a good manager since the Jocky Scott and Smiffy combo, and the latter fucked us over when it really mattered in May 91. Your IMPRESSION that I reserve my ire exclusively for Calderwood alone is unfair. I don't actually blame him for being useless. I blame AFC plc for employing him for so long. I actually blame our club more for keeping Langfield for as long as we did, Leighton's part in this being minor and also perfectly understandable, him and JC being cunts who we didn't see through early enough. That's insulting. I have moved on. Of course it's history. But when the boy said second is a bare minimum this season, your mate agreed with this and yet he did not have the same common sense expectations in the late 00's. I was pointing out a contradiction between his posting then and now, not that he can even remember what he thought back then.

I ignored the further insult yet again and here was where you are mistaken: - EDIT: Doh! Yes I was mistaken. Sorry! I just assumed he wouldn't be so rude and so pussy not to answer a simple question, one that wasn't contentious in the least.

Haha. Too shay. A rare laff on a site conspicuous by its humour void. Get out of the sticks gentlemen, as the Wolf said. Dumbarton Road is too far out. Amber Regent and Opium are the best.

Ok already. The Huns and Celtic. My broader point was that when we were underachieving year after year after year, it was nothing to do with the size of our football budget. There was something else at play. We will agree to disagree if you can't recall how Calderwood was defended on this site when most of us wanted rid of the cunt early doors, indeed some of us never wanted the fat bastard to begin with and his career post AFC proves how fucking shite he is and always was. And for accuracy, I didn't say "altogether" as you did, implying EVERYONE on this site. I said "many". Only a fucking idiot attributes ONE same opinion to a whole site, particularly on something so contentious and concerning subjective realities like personality-assessments, even though his fiercest critics were proved right. I agree that we have had equally shite managers and I assure you that my scorn for their incompetence is similarly reserved. But this backs up my principal point, that something else is the foundation reason for our club being shite for over 20 years. Who recruited all these shit managers in the last 20+ years? I'll debate Milne's record all day every day. Where was the ambition to produce performances commensurate with our budget when we were bottom six? And where were the agitators for change when Blunderwood was leading us nowhere? Your mate - who says he knows two of you, how you think and agrees with everything you say - couldn't even remember his role as a JC apologist.

Certainly was. It was a great finish but the set up play before it was sublime.

Benzema just now. Sheer class. This has been a treat these last few days, having the time to watch a ton of football and it all being good. Watched more these last two weeks than I have all season. Brilliant stuff.

Going stir crazy in this awful weather. The only time I've left the house the last two days was to collect the carry-out. It was from the Manchurian (close to the Mounthooly roundabout). If you like chinese food, this is the best in the area in my opinion. The fact that many chinese eat there provides good corroboration. This won't affect any arseholes living outwith the North East of course but for any of you locals, check it out if you haven't before.