The Original 59er

Can you imagine a late life ruined by sport you loved? As a centre half, signed I think by Saints from Beith Juniors, he will have headed heavy, wet leather footballs throughout all his formative years and these would have been important in initiating the medical condition. There are now too many with the condition for it not to be recognised as (technically) an indutrial injury. It makes you wonder if today's central defenders are as worried!

Yes the original question was slightly rushed, but I think the principle got there. I agree that Saturday is pretty important in the overall context of the top 6, but I also think we play a more attractive form than Livi and a less physically confrontational style (deliberately ignoring the stat showing that the two most frequent foulers in the uk appear to be from Paisley!). Personally I would prefer not to watch a Livi style week in week out as it would bore the socks off me and it does constantly surprise me how regularly they challenge for the top 6 spot - even with a home support that varies between 1400 and 3000 depending on what team visits outside of the two Glasgow and Edinburgh clubs. Give me our option and miss out on the top 6 would be my preference, depending on how much of a supporter or advocate you are for the principle of a stupid split with 5 games left to go.

ok a general question. Given that Livingston are now above us and we proabably have a harder run in than them for the top 6, would you rather support the Buddies playing the way they do, and probably not get into the top 6, or would you prefer to see us continue with our current approach and probably lose out on that top 6 spot due to their direct, physical tactics?

Dougie Somner would have to be there in terms of the original question: Pick any former St Mirren player from any era to play and help the present team for the remainder of this Season and get us a European place and may help us win the Scottish Cup. I really think we are dying out for a prolific striker. So for me, it's got to be... Yes I know Shull chose him in the original post, but that is the exact type of player we currently need ................. someone who was a natural penalty box striker and took a higher percentage of goals from the chances that came his way. THAT is exactly what we need just now P.S. Gerry Baker, Tommy Bryceland, Frank McGarvey & Frank McDougall all come close but I would argue that Somner perhaps performed better and scored more in a team that provided the opportunities (he was the highest goalscorer in the league in 79/80 which no other Buddies player has ever achieved!)

When this subject was first introduced I basically thought that this next 6 games is going to make or break our season, and I excluded the Celtic cup game in that thought process. Two league losses in and it isn't a great start. Yes SR can say after the Cup defeat: "now let's concentrate on the league and cement a top 6 place". So we have to get into an away result mentality. We have a good home record, (and it's just as well as the away record is pretty awful), and start pulling points out of the difficult games away from Paisley, otherwise I think bottom 6 will beckon again. 😒

He won't be able to play against us, so hopefully he hits some form (which I think is deep down in there somewhere) and does damage to our fellow contestants for that 6th place. I agree that maybe we don't, or haven't been playing the style of football that suits his set of skills, but he has succeeded before. I wish him luck in Dingwall.

The reality of last night was somewhat predictable, and not unsurprising. Scottish football overall is at a pretty low ebb and if you strip the two OF sides and maybe Hearts (just now), out of the equation, then you can see that the difference in standard between the 5th placed team in Scotland and the juniors of yesterday and now the 6th tier of our mighty game is not a lot. I say that the result was not unsurprising and I really mean that. Just look at Aberdeen's current away form and in reality the standard of player that they currently have and then look at Darvel's current form (won 10 Drawn 1 and lost 2) so on one side you have a team in a slump and on the other Darvel are not short of a winning mentality. In addition no premier team (other than maybe the three mentioned above) goes into any encounter away from home with any side, all the way down to Bonnyrigg Rose (currently at the bottom of League 2) and expect to walk in and win by a large margin, if indeed to win at all. So is our standard dumbing down to the lowest common denominator, or is the standard of the lower leagues creeping up? I would prefer to think the latter as teams now are better drilled in tactics than they were 10 or 15 years ago and to exemplify that, all you have to do is look at the international scene where teams that were push overs 20 years ago now manage to contain opposition and compete regularly on the national stage. The same applies to the Darvels of this world and they too have brought their standard up in order to try and get into ther national tier level. That having all been said the bulk of the Premier League teams aren't much better than the third tier of English football and it shows when our star goalkeeper of last year struggles to get any game time for Cardiff City and also many so-called Scottish stars head off down there to the Chmapionship and League 1, and come back two or three seasons later with their tails between their legs. Still it doesn't stop me from dreaming of glory, or stop me supporting the team I have followed since the age of 9, and it follows all the way down to Darvel whose supporters will have been energised by last night's performance and will hopefully form an allegiance that may well last 50+ years!

Sorry would never have McGowan in there ahead of Richardson, or for that matter Víctor Muñoz

Tend to agree with TC's comment, maybe it should be something along the lines of: Your Best St Mirren Eleven in the Last 50 Years. If we are going to disagree over the title, then as a minor adjudicator in this debate I would probably have to side with TC's comment and have Dunky Walker and Davy McCrae in the mix along with Willie Summers (In 1920 he went on loan to St Bernard’s before joining St Mirren in May 1921 as part of a player exchange, where in April 1926 he was part of St Mirren’s 1926 Scottish Cup Final success when they shocked holders Celtic 2-0 in the Final at Hampden Park, the club’s first Scottish Cup win, The Buddies having beaten the other half of the Auld Firm, Rangers, in the semi final at Celtic Park three weeks earlier. Summers then earned his single Scotland cap, playing in a 1-0 win over England at Old Trafford a week after the Scottish Cup Final triumph)

It is very concerning for a club our size, but I would be more concerned if this was a pattern year on year, rather than a report covering perhaps one of the most turbulent financial and business scenarios to have hit our country in the last 50 years or so. Our club got into severe financial difficulties in trying to keep up with the Jones's back in the 80's and 90's which eventually led to the Board managing to conjure up a finacial miracle in getting Tesco to pay a significant figure to bail us out with the banks....... If we were to encounter similar figures again next year then I would begin to worry, as there ain't no family silver to sell off next time round 😰 The only saving grace in all of this is that I expect quite a few clubs throughout the country to show similar losses covering this last financial year.

If I look back at really successful St Mirren teams and their set up we usually had at least one if not two players in our main team that could control the ball well and pick out a pass. e.g. Richardson, Stark or Weir of the early 80's Fitzpatrick or Scanlon Mid 80's Billy Davies or Paul Lambert around 1990 Carey, McLean McGowan and Teale of the mid naughties............... I can go on! I'm not seeing that in our team at present. Keanu Baccus is good at what he does but so far I haven't seen the penetrating pass regularly nor the gliding past opponents that most if not all of the above could do. Yes Grieve scored with a header on Saturday but did you note his movement before he met the head high ball into the box? His runs are dependent on good passes into the box and to be exact, it wasn't a long ball, it was a fairly short good cross. I appreciate that cost comes into it, I also appreciate that we are a secondary, peripheral team in the context of the Premier League, but history has shown we can really become a good team with that added dimension.

Generally we play the long (high) ball too much, and the consequences are that often the big defences mop the ball up fairly easily. Take the Livingston or Killie defences. They are tall and fairly physical much taller that Main, Brophy or Grieve so overall there isn't much chance of winning high balls against them. I would like to see it mixed up a bit more often, but I'm also not sure we have the dribbling kind of player that can easily beat their opposite number. I get the impression that yes on occasions we can beat a player with speed, but not on close contact dribbling. I agree that Grieve is a much better player when the ball is kept on the ground or he is expected to use close control, and that shows with his darting runs and goals which he generally takes well. The long high ball to him (and also BRopy to an extent) is a waste of possession. So if you asked my opinion of what we might need for Christmas - a player who can hold the ball, beat his man and put in a good pass to sharp forwards - Too much to ask from Santa's pressie bag?

Really good series of photographs of the town : Paisley Early beginnings - Paisley Scotland (yahoo.com)

What amused me most wasn't the result, because technically the better Sevco or 'tic do well in Europe, then the more teams from our Scottish system will get into Europe, but the score at 4-1. A picture came up of the "fans" streaming out of the stadium, not just in the tens or twenties, nor in the hundreds, but in the thousands. To be a supporter of any club you have to live with the ups and DOWNS, but of course, theoretical Sevco "fans" expect nothing but wins all the time, so they haven't learned how to take defeat graciously, or to even think of staying on and watching how football should be played. The problem for Sevco, perhaps more than the Eastenders, is that they are trying to compete at a level that is away beyond their capabilities. The second or perhaps the third tier in Europe would suit them more and see them having a chance to compete. I think it's slightly ironic that they were on when they fluked the win to gain entry to the Champions League and they are now going to finish bottom of their section with no points and no further participation in Europe, whilst if they had settled for the Europa League they would probably be heading into the New Year with some hope of having another run. Liverpool were good last night, but they only really turned it on when they brought on such good players which Sevco had no ability to challenge. It was men against nursery school children. 😆

Turning to matters footie.............. I trully didn't expect anything out of this game as we have a pretty abysmal record at Iprox and if you don't take any chance you get, then you pay for it. Our season however will not be determined by results at either the east or west ends of Glasgow, it will be because we perform well at home and take good points occasionally away from home. So the next two games are much more important to where we end up, than the 12 points to be fought over in Glasgow.

This post got me thinking of that bus route to Ayr. It was one of a myriad of buses that came along Glasgow Road past Barshaw Park and came to the town centre, but the Ayr bus along with a few others went down Cotton Street where it stopped opposite the Abbey. However I have been trying to work out exactly what the route would have been for the bus as it left Paisley. Did it head through Barrhead and then south? I can't really remember, but someone here will!

Bit late on to the page, following Saturday's attendance, but never too late! Profligate - that's the only word I can think of to describe the frustrations felt throughout the entire 2nd half. Yes we had more chances than Hibs and if each had taken their obvious goal-scoring chances the score should have been 5-2 (or maybe 3) to the Buddies. That probably didn't reflect the performance if you look at both sides and their respective input to the game, but we know well enough, you don't have to dominate a game to win it! If we had been playing some other teams we wouldn't have got away with it and the opposition would have got at least 1 or 2 goals, so best to say it's work in progress, and we are still to find that regular net-finding striker that can take at least 1 or 2 of these chances that we passed up. My personal opinion, - we played ok, but we got away with it on this occasion.

The irony is that through the years salmon have run both the Black and White Carts! Just ask the "fishermen" who have stood at the falls behind the Watermill and tried all kinds of methods to extract them, even in the rat infested era prior to the Piazza. Sadness is that the decline of Salmon in the Cart isn't down to the quality of the water per se, but all the other factors that have combined to kill off a huge asset to Scotland. 😰

Found this photo the other day which i hadn't seen before. There are plenty of the Piazza, but not so many at this stage in construction.

Aye and the said Bobby Vee album was a release date of 14 July 1962 and Telstar was 17 August 1962. I had a paper round at that time, so my record collection started to appear after the start of '62.

Came across a really interesting bit of historical info, which I had no idea existed - see: 1882 – Town Hall, Paisley, Scotland – Archiseek – Irish Architecture There was a competition in the late 19th Century for designs to be submitted for a new Paisley Town Hall. The story behind it all is caught in the attached webpage but the diagrams are really interesting. The first set of plans was by John Robertson: The second batch was by Rennison & Scott, I believe a Paisley firm of architects and they thought they had won the commission, only for the Clark family to prevaricate and then award the job to W. H Lynn, an Irish architect (batch 3) with the final building photo as the completed project.

At the game against Ross County I was (pleased) and amazed to see how many away strips were being worn by the crowd throughout the ground. If you produce something that is well thought through and quality (of design), it proves that the fans will go for it. Personally I think it's a great strip in its own right.

You are probably right, I can't remember the doors of the cubicles, but I seem to remember the fibreboard panelled walls which were punctured in a regular pattern presumably to absorb sound (or at least that's what they thought it was doing) . Also you are correct on the price of an album, around that price also rings a bell with me too. The price didn't change very much for a single or an album for quite a few years. First single I bought myself (not bought for me by my parents or sister) was 'Telstar' by the Tornadoes and the first album was beleive it or not was Bobby Vee meets the Crickets (which I don't have anymore 😔....... and maybe that was 17'6d!)

Two good pics of Paisley's TV / Electrical / Record stores. Cuthbertsons was the best as it had these specil booths upstairs where you could go and listen to the record before buying - 6/8d for a single and I think 17/6d for a LP. What I remember of the booths were the holed panels surrounding the sides and back of the unitand I think a glass door, can't quite remember that detail. As an added bonus the "Caprice" was just about next door where you could go and get a plate of chips, tomato sauce and a drink post school hours - not food that yer Ma served up later that same day! 😃

Good little website with lots of history for those who liked to stand at the end of the platforms at Gilmour Street and watch the choo-choos go by! PBDR4 (paisleyhistory.uk)