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div

The Gaffers
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Everything posted by div

  1. So what you're saying is, you like it?
  2. Ethan Erhahon, He fucking hates the 'ton. He plays in black and white, He makes your team look shite He passes everywhere, He wins them in the air, And once he said to me, I love St.Murn FC.......... Repeat To the brilliant Charlie Patino song;
  3. It seems what was said last week at the meeting was a bit muddled. All will come out in due course as the accounts to the year ended May 31st 2022 will be issued in a few months, usually December I think, so we will find out then!
  4. Worth looking at the Chairman's Report in the last set of accounts to the year ending May 2021; The grant we received from the Government was £920K. Data and info from the published accounts you can read here; https://www.blackandwhitearmy.com/downloads/accounts-may2021.pdf So yes, we have a debt of almost £1m but this is a manageable 20 year repayment debt with zero interest. Nothing in itself to be alarmed about. I was not at the meeting last week so unsure exactly what was said. What actually matters is what our operating loss was for last season. If we've brought in money for McGrath, and compensation for Goodwin (even if some of that was spent getting Robinson) and still made a heavy loss then we should all be concerned.
  5. Deeply worrying times. Difficult at the moment to really say what our strongest XI is but you could certainly argue that Carson, Shaughnessy, Brophy, Main and Baccus would be in it and that's almost half a team different to the one that started last night. Jay Henderson should also be in there well ahead of Olusanya IMO. The gamble on Ayunga and Olusanya isn't looking massively clever right now, but we just have to hope that at least one of them will get going eventually because if they don't we are in a bit of bother. The side is really lacking in creativity and I can't see Baccus being the answer to that going by what I've read about his attributes.
  6. We make a wee bit revenue on the site through the advertisements we run. It's not a massive amount but it does cover our hosting costs, and the licenses for the forum software etc.. There's a bit left over after those costs, so I've decided, on behalf of you lot who at the end of the day ensure the ads make money, to use that to donate to the Help A Buddie scheme. So today I've purchased 10 tickets to allow fellow buds in the community get along to a game they could not otherwise get to. This is probably the most difficult time to ask supporters to dig deep for even more money to support their club but I'd hope that some local Saints friendly businesses might step up and match us. If you do, then you can purchase the tickets here; https://www.stmirren.com/tickets.shtml
  7. I am a useless bastard and was supposed to publish this poll this week after getting an agreement from the 1877 club that we could piggyback on them presenting their awards for the season after today's game and hand over ours at the same time. Trophies didn't look like they would arrive on time so like a big baldy bastard I did nothing and then THE FUCKING TROPHIES ARRIVED THIS MORNING. So we have rushed to put together the quickest poll in the history of Player of the Year awards. Voting closes at 16:45 TODAY. Sorry folks! Choose your main player of the year and your Tam McGarry young player of the year for season 21-22 below. Mind Ronan has won pretty much everything so whilst he is a more than deserving candidate this is our chance to reward one of the other stellar performers in the squad. But it's up to YOU! And once more, apologies for the rush , feel free to give me a slap when you see me. Baldy useless baldy bastard! Couple of the young members of the South West North Bank W1 crew will be handing over the awards after the game today in the 1877. VOTE HERE https://www.blackandwhitearmy.com/poty
  8. Didn't end particularly well for him at Fir Park but whilst there is never any guarantee of success this looks, on paper anyway, to be fairly low risk. We've been through an awful lot as a club (and an awful lot of money) to get close to establishing ourselves as a proper Premiership club and not just one that flirts with relegation every season. The market wasn't exactly awash with outstanding candidates and Robinson looks a pretty safe pair of hands to me. This wasn't the time to gamble on a rookie IMHO.
  9. I think the club have come out of this last week very well. First of all we had the foresight to build a very decent compensation clause into Goody's contract - £250K is absolutely not to be sniffed at. They obviously knew Jim was going latter part of the week but even so to have appointed his successor 3 days after he officially left is pretty stellar work and they managed to keep Robinson's name quiet until the very last minute which again is very unlike us! To have ended up with a solid, experienced manager who has a proven track record of doing well in this division and getting to the latter stages of cup competitions with a similar sized club is excellent work. Robinson also has a history of bringing though young players and has had great success bringing players up from England and selling them on at a profit too. The appointment ticks every box and to have all of that AND £150K profit is just outstanding.
  10. The latest club accounts have been issued; https://www.blackandwhitearmy.com/downloads/accounts-may2021.pdf
  11. I think there's an element of Kibble getting the blame for absolutely everything at the moment which is a bit unfair. Gordon is still on the board, and John is a good guy to have at the helm and I've every confidence in the other SMiSA reps that are on the board. This is the very start of fan ownership and whilst we're going through a rocky period it should eventually, hopefully settle down. An awful lot has changed at the club, very quickly, and that was always going to take time to settle in. Personally I'm not massively happy about a number of things that have happened and the general comms have been abysmal but I think things like the new ticketing system will be an improvement going forward, Pitch Pro being on board is good news, and the new catering stuff looks like it might be a bit more expansive than we had before. The strength of feeling was clearly evident tonight (I was not there but going by the transcript it's pretty clear) and hopefully that will give all parties food for thought and the follow on meeting in 4 weeks might be more positive. A wee bit of calm wouldn't go amiss right now, IMO.
  12. You can now flick between the forum default colour scheme and "dark mode". Just click the wee moon icon in the toolbar, click it again to switch back.
  13. Really disappointed with the way the club has behaved and (again) communicated over this. Firstly all season ticket holders are told they can get into the game, but the general sale information is just bolted on to the end of that announcement, anyone visiting the club website as a PAYG punter wouldn't even know they can buy tickets for the match on Sunday. Very poor IMO. As far as the seating plan is concerned it looks very much like every stand except the Main Stand is fully open with zero restrictions - so why not just say that instead of "every season ticket holder will get in"? Such a strange way of communicating what should have been very welcome (and overdue) news!? We still don't have season ticket cards - which is another shambles - we've had 18 months to sort out our new ticketing platform and get things all in place - yet everything has been rushed at the very last minute meaning season tickets were late - we had the re-registration mess - and now we don't even have our season ticket cards going into September FFS. Yes we can apparently use our barcode to get in - you think everyone will still have that to hand? Will everyone know that's what they're supposed to do? I expect long queues at the gates on Sunday with inevitable delays as folk try and get in. Ridiculous. And as for the treatment of the away fans - frankly I'm just embarassed about how we've played that. Even if the whole of the main stand was ruled out as a red zone (which it isn't) there would be plenty room in the South and West Stands to accommodate every St.Mirren fan who wants to go to this game, leaving the North Stand for the away supporters. Just because we got shafted by Celtic last weekend doesn't mean we should take the same approach. It's absolutely shite behaviour to be locking out away supporters, not to mention the loss of revenue we'll take from such a selfish approach. We're now going to have plenty of available seats in the West and South, whilst locking out the away fans from the North. These are not the actions of a well run competent top flight football club. IMO.
  14. A reminder that SMiSA are inviting members to submit their feedback on the recent operational issues the club has experienced over the Summer. A link to the feedback form is here; https://freeonlinesurveys.com/s/IIVLdfod#/0 Please do consider taking the time to complete, the more feedback the better.
  15. I ordered online but picked it up in the shop when it was ready. I wore mine on Sat and it’s been washed and come out fine. The Skyview logo is actually part of the fabric of the shirt (like it was in recent years) rather than a transfer, so the Digby Brown stuff isn’t a transfer on top of a transfer if that makes sense? Certainly can’t blame Pitch Pro for any of this, it’s a shambles of a situation to fall out so spectacularly with our main sponsor. Will be interesting to hear exactly what happened but I’d be surprised if it doesn’t end up in court.
  16. A slight aside but I thought the shop was looking brilliant when I was in, and the new range of merchandise looks top quality!
  17. Better late than never, here's Jamie and Ethan with their awards. Cheers to Jimbo for sorting for us.
  18. Rangers confirming full capacity on Tuesday for the visit of Malmo, 51000 at that game. 76 hours previously, 7.5 miles away, we are supposed to stomach getting 12% capacity at our stadium? Do me a favour.
  19. I think John tried to explain the situation, but I'm not convinced his statement really helped. We are told that we have to leave two seats free and can only use every other row in our stand because of the distance between rows etc... That's all well and good in isolation but when you see several hundred fans in both the home and away end standing right next to each other last weekend just a few miles up the road in Motherwell then it doesn't really stack up. Lanarkshire is operating under level 0 restrictions at the moment the same as Renfrewshire is, so something isn't right here. We've got Glasgow City Council offering FULL CAPACITY at Ibrox and Parkhead next midweek, 50000 & 60000 respectively, yet we are supposed to swallow that we can only have 1039 in our stadium this weekend, when the advertised lowest guideline for level 0 is 2000? It doesn't add up at all and you can completely understand why fans are not happy. I'm not expecting the chairman of the club to throw the Council under the bus here but something isn't right, St.Mirren have been given an absolutely terrible deal here and to compound all of that the club's communication with it's most loyal fans on the matter has been an absolute shambles. There isn't even an acknowledgement on the official website that the ballot has been drawn FFS! Season ticket holders who didn't get a ticket are left completely in the dark, why didn't they get an email too even if it was just to say "Sorry you didn't get one this time". Nothing at all! These are the punters who pitched up £300+ last season and who didn't get to set foot in the stadium ONCE, yet we were asked to pony up the same £300+ again this season and almost 3000 of us jumped through several hoops to do so. Then we don't even get a proper explanation of why we're still locked out, we aren't told the ballot has been run and we don't get a courtesy email telling us we've not been fortunate enough to get a ticket! It's all very very basic stuff here and frankly it's not good enough. Even the Season Ticket TV access on Saturday is a mess. I've read the article on the website telling me I need to use a new login and password for this season, yet I can absolutely guarantee that my 76 year old season ticket holding dad will be utterly confused as to what the fuck is going on - he doesn't read the website and he doesn't visit social media - so how the fuck is he supposed to know how to watch the game - a game that he has paid for the same as all the rest of us mugs. An absolute utter shambles.
  20. And it's perfectly understandable. Every season ticket holder should be at the game on Saturday, nobody is going to persuade me any differently. It's an absolute disgrace that we are looking at 1000 attendance on Saturday when by Monday the figure will miraculously be 5000. Someone definitely needs their balls kicked, it's just a matter of clarifying who it should be.
  21. It's exactly how it works mate. SMiSA members decide who from SMiSA sits on the club board and we have the majority of seats at that table. I'm not exactly sure why Kibble are getting the blame for the capacity at the stadium being an absolute farce, it's very clear to me that it's Renfrewshire Council who should be getting the heat for this absurd situation.
  22. The actual chairman of the club is a SMiSA rep and the former chairman of the club is still on the board. The board are collectively making the day to day decisions regarding how the club is run. That is exactly as it should be. The fans literally OWN the majority shareholding of the club, that's what Buy The Buds was all about. Seems a wee bit like we are getting to the point of if in any doubt, just blame Kibble!
  23. Your point is valid in that fans are never going to have a say in day to day decisions the club makes, that has always been the case as it should be. As majority shareholders (of less than a week let's remember) we are certainly entitled to make our views known if we are unhappy with things the club are doing. Any fan, SMiSA member or not, can channel that feedback through the SLO route or through SMiSA. If things got really bad to a point where the SMiSA members lost faith in their own board members they can vote to replace them. That's how it works.
  24. That isn't actually true. The reason the two league cup games were not taken into account for subsequent ballots was that the club was concerned folk would not apply for a ticket for the League Cup matches if they knew it was going to rule them out of getting a ticket for the first home league game. The plan was always that league game ballots would be done fairly - ie; If you got Hearts you wouldn't be eligible for St.Johnstone That is all hopefully moot now that the capacity is increasing from Monday but that is and always has been the thinking behind it.
  25. The old "e-Store" that I set-up for the club was used to sell the hospitality and replica kit. In addition to that we had "St.Mirren Direct" which was the outsourced club merchandise store. You'll have noticed there was two tills in the shop, one for buying replica kit and the other for buying other club merchandise. There were tax related reasons for that set-up, but it wasn't really ideal. As part of the changes taking place and the move to Pitch-Pro Retail everything will be under one roof both in terms of online and the physical club shop. I'm not involved in the set-up of the new online stuff so not sure when it's going live or what domain it is going to use. Needless to say being unable to buy a replica kit in the first week of August is an absolutely shite state of affairs. I get that it's perhaps related to the Skyview debacle but it feels like there is always some issue or another with the strips every year. If it was up to me (and I guess it is now partly up to all of us SMiSA members) the new kits for the next season would be launched at the end of the previous campaign. Get the strips on sale before the summer holidays, it's not rocket science. Maximise the sales by bringing the away kit out later, maybe launched at a family open day at the stadium as part of our pre-season preparation, get the stands open, let the kids meet the players, get some entertainment in, make a day of it. In short, make it easy for supporters to spend money, and they will. Make it difficult and they'll find something else to spend their hard earned on.
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