RicoS321

Booooo. Fucking Hun. Should never wear the red shirt again.

But we've never had average crowds anywhere near 17K, even when we were good. Is this just realism? Should we be spending £16M to cater for the fans that only turn up for the big games (and sometimes not even then)? With the nation's league, there are going to be few friendlies and the opportunity to host a Scotland game is extremely limited (maybe once every five years?). Unless we were looking at 30K seats, there is no reason to hold Scotland games at a new pittodrie over tynecastle or Easter road. We definitely shouldn't be including that measure in our decision making. I also doubt that Elton John will be refusing a gig because of the extra 3K either, he'll either play in Aberdeen or not, and that occurs once a decade (and fuck that anyway). In both situations, we'd be paid for ground rental rather than ticket sales anyway. I get the concern about being season ticket focused, but I don't think that you're point about waiting until a Friday is an issue. Most people will know whether or not they can go to a game in advance (I'll hand my ticket to my mate if I'm not going to be at the next game for example - before QR codes of course!) and will likely want to cash in on selling their ticket early. There's an offset there. However, the biggest problem I envisage that I hadn't considered until your post was not necessarily that people can't afford a ticket, but that those who can afford tickets but don't usually buy a season ticket will buy one so that they can go to the bigger games. The option to formally sell your unused ticket, coupled with scarcity, creates an apartheid between those who can afford to buy, say, 4 tickets and those that want to go to the majority of games but can't afford a season ticket. It returns a situation a lot like the DNA points scam. I could simply buy a ticket for a decent seat and sell it every week until a big game and then go to that. I'd like to see a way to counteract that so we can prioritise fans going to games (say if you attend <12 games per season you can only buy a half season ticket or some such). It's a difficult balance between forcing scarcity to get bigger crowds and being realistic as to our average crowds. I think 16K will result in too scarce a product, but 17K might produce the happy spot of having lots of unsold tickets regularly. For some weird reason, I'd feel happier if it was 18K. I can quite believe the £16M figure, you're talking an entire deck the length of the South to get an extra 4,000 seats. It's not a small thing. A sheet of OSB is around £1M today. I don't think it'll actually go ahead any time soon anyway. Maybe the reduced capacity is just to butter us up for a reduced capacity pittodrie when this latest idea gets booted out.

Looks cool. I mean, it's no Brockville, but it's nice.

A good point. I would say that their motive is affordability - first and foremost - however. I think you'd have to offset the missed income on those attendances versus the cost associated with having empty seats for the overwhelming majority of games. The four games in 18-19 would have resulted in 9k seats of missed revenue (assuming 17k capacity). Maybe £250k? That could be recouped quite easily if other fixtures increased attendance due to scarcity as per the club's plan. I'm not convinced that the group stages would actually return us the type of crowd we think either. They would if we weren't regularly getting there of course but then if we regularly got to that stage I could easily envisage a drop off in popularity unless we get a perceived "big side". I just don't think we're that well supported. One thing that did bother me was the re-selling of tickets. A great concept, but I have a feeling that all tickets will then be tied to your electronic device, and you won't be able to pass on to a friend for nothing. I'm guessing if it's just a small admin fee that might be okay, but it's free just now.

Agree about the capacity. I think 17k would be a good size, and infinitely better than a 20k stadium in Aberdeenshire. Unless the plan was always to trick the council into proposing a better location, you have to wonder about the Westhill abomination. It really is the most deluded plan on the planet. Can't believe the number of dons fans who thought it was even remotely acceptable. The ticket thing is a bit of a non-issue these days. You just buy it on your phone and walk in scanning the phone. By 2025 it'll be 99% of purchases.

It would be disallowed, because attacking players aren't allowed in the wall.

Nah, definitely not. Going by the old, proper, handball rules it was completely fine. The new, shite, rules mean it is a foul.

Great result in a really stuffy game in difficult conditions. Good finish by Jenks, a modern day handball but he didn't know much about it. Ramirez barely touched the ball but if that outrageous shot had gone in it would have been goal of the season. Defence were decent and Ferguson and Brown good in midfield too. It just took that bit of niggly bite to build up in the game for us to wake up and win it. Good stuff.

Agreed, he's done well in possession, but he offers very little on the overlap even just to drag the defender out of position. I'd consider McLennan there in the second half if we don't score soon. A couple of decent opportunities but in general we've been short of ideas. Reminds me of many of our games so far this season where possession is easy for us, whilst at the same time being easy to play against. Hedges is struggling to find the space and not much has come off for him so far. Not convinced by their penalty shout. Bates has done alright, been good on the ball.

I couldn't be responsible for your unemployment.

No, it isn't tunnel vision, I think you're using the wrong term. I'd happily move to many different places in the world, but Vancouver wouldn't be one of them. Falkirk is closer to my friends and family, thus would win out over Vancouver. I'd be more likely to move somewhere in Finland or France than Vancouver for example. I don't particularly like cities. I think most are unnatural, unsustainable, abominations, so if I were moving to Canada I'd likely move to one of the islands or some such. If I were interested in expanding my horizons, however, I wouldn't likely move to another English speaking country recently settled by my own country's descendents.

Same team three weeks running? Crazy.

Have you been to Falkirk? I wouldn't want to live in Vancouver. I expect there are better places to live in Canada. It has nothing to do with tunnel vision. Some humans like different things to others.

I think McInnes would do a good job there, but they might want to wait until after the cup final against Celtic.

I agree. Although no coincidence Alex Neil was covering their game last night I suspect. Reckon they'll be getting in quick before he gets another gig. A couple of poor signings has made the difference. They didn't strengthen in the key areas to take them to the next level. A few players in there, guys like Gogic and I'd say Doyle-Hayes and Newell too) aren't consistently good enough to compete with even the dons and hearts in midfield. I think Ross is a decent manager, but the margins between success and failure are very tight in this league.

I disagree. In the last two games his movement was excellent. He doesn't move far or fast, he just drifts left to right across the pitch, dropping deep too, if necessary. The number of times in the Livingston game he received the ball in space demonstrated that perfectly. Less so in the St Mirren game, but still fairly regular. He doesn't charge about like an idiot, he just watches his opponent and takes a few steps away from him at the right time, offering an outball. It's intelligent movement rather than constant movement, which is what you need from a player of his pace (lack of). I sit in the RDL, and maybe it's more obvious from the end view, compared to if you were in the South or Main or watching on TV - because his movement is quite horizontal at times. It requires a strong and disciplined midfield two to prevent the break though, as he's clearly not getting back to defend in any hurry. Ferguson provided that on Saturday very well, and less so Brown (what the fuck was he doing for their goal?) who looks like he might benefit from the 7 day rest.

That's a shame. Seemed like a decent guy. He never really struck me as a manager.

I mentioned on Wednesday that Jet allowed us to play a much better style against the poorer opponent. His movement was good again today, occupying the space behind Ramirez, although he did have to use his head a lot more than on Wednesday. It draws a player out, and we're effectively playing four up front. He actually got back and helped out very well today too, but it was also easy to exploit hence the introduction of Jenks. It's risky, but entertaining. He's an enigma though, next week he'll be pish.

That was unexpected. A great performance and a great game in the conditions. Hedges at his very best today and the rest not far behind. Pace on the attack and clinical finishing. Jet was great and Jenks came on and did well too. Probably the best performance at pittodrie this season, discounting the European games.

What play acting? I've no idea what you're on about.

I thought you were suggesting he was being racist. I had already seen his reaction to the penalty and didn't think much of it, so assumed you must have been talking about something else. The penalty was soft. The player dived, but TV has changed the rules of fitba to be slightest touch = penalty, as opposed to whether the contact, in a contact sport, was enough for the player to fall over. Bates had a couple of similar dives for us last night.

You should always provide links, or some sort of explanation to your rant, otherwise you look a little crazy.

Decent game tonight, glad I went. We played well and dominated the game. They were relegation material. Ojo probably the only weak link tonight (offensively, he wasn't troubled in defence), but still better than Gurr. Agree with tlg that Bates was good tonight, he's significantly better than McRorie in that left centre half role. McRorie had a couple of unnecessary ropey moments too, but was generally quick enough to recover. Ferguson, Hayes, Hedges all played well alongside Bates too. Jet worked hard tonight, his movement was very good left to right. Against weaker opposition, where tracking back isn't as important (although he was okay at that tonight) it's a really useful outlet to have. It draws players out giving us far more space in behind and in the final third more generally. In better conditions, I could see us getting more from him too, it's difficult to pull off one touch control and flicks in a windy, wet night, but he was fine and deserves a place against st mirren. Overall, a good team performance, which should see us beat the Paisley minks on Saturday.

I've just been for a walk. It's fucking freezing. This is where I don't get the whole "you can't have more teams in the league, it'll reduce the number of fixtures" nonsense. Games like tonight are a complete chore to attend and we'll end up with a shite crowd. Just ditch winter midweek fixtures, they're fucking awful.

I think that moving players on is more important than signings in January. We've got a massive squad, filled with filler. We can't see the Woods (pun intended) for the trees. I'd like to see about six or seven moved on and maybe one or two in. Devlin, Kennedy, the three loanees, Jet all binned. Probably McLennan too. Attacking midfielder and a winger in place of them. Sorted.