TigerFeet

...plus your bank account number, sort code, pin code and signature, and Pozbaird will wire you the monies.

The problem is - are any of these players good enough to be first-team regulars in the Scottish Prem? Not to mention good enough to progress us up the league? Or good enough that any other team will want to come in and pay top dollar for them? Considering they've played a handful of first-team games among them, pre-season or otherwise (and most of them have been by Reilly so far), you have to question if our much-lauded youth development really is as good as we make it out to be. When was the last time we produced a striker who can score goals at this level? Or a goalkeeper? The last defender we produced was Marc McAusland, who has progressed well since he came back here but it took him a fair while to get going - and he is part of a very leaky defence, so you do have to question even if he is that good (*waits for barrage of anti-McAusland accusations*). In recent years, we've produced perhaps two sellable players ourselves (if I remember correctly): Stephen McGinn and Simon Lappin. Our next two 'hottest' prospects are very much in the mould of those two players. We seem to like producing central/left-sided midfielders, but a football team has 11 different positions to fill. If we are going to rely on bringing our own youngsters through, we have a lot of work to do. So, until such times as we have enough young prospects who are good enough to be first-team regulars, surely our signing policy must look to those who are ready to step in and do a job at this level. Like you say, unfortunately, we don't seem to be doing either.

Oh dear, missing the point completely. 1. Our defence has been woeful for the best part of three or four seasons now. But we've not signed a player in the key central defensive position in all that time. In fact, we've signed three temporary left-backs - who until Grainger signed were our only permanent defensive signings since the summer we signed McAusland, McGregor, etc! So, basically, we've made no attempt to improve what is a weak defence with a view to the longer-term. Why? 2. The fact that we have four central defenders on the books is irrelevant. You don't just sign up a certain number of players and say 'that's us got our quota'. If that was the case, we could sign four folk on minimum wage, tag them as defenders and that'd be us sorted. 3. We're not flapping around after one match. Our defensive inadequacies have been obvious for a long time now. Yet nobody at the club seems to have acknowledged this, if our signings in recent times are anything to go by. If you read back to matches at the start of this year, you'll realise people had concerns then. They had concerns when we lost 12 goals in three pre-season matches. This latest reaction is just a continuation of that. 4. Who is expecting or believing they're entitled to anything? I'm not. But the fact is that we are capable of being a top-six side. Look at St Johnstone with their Creggs and Hasselbainks, Ross County with their Lawsons and Brittains... we deemed almost all of these players not good enough for us yet they've gone on to better things while we fight one relegation battle after another. Granted, some took a step back to take a step forward again, but they've still ended up in a better place. Now, I'm being selective, and plenty of other players have gone on to nothing. But the point I'm making is that we have had and can have the standard of player capable of achieving a top six finish, a European place. Yet, we don't seem to be able to get the most out of these players while they're at our club. We have to ask why that is the case. I realise that point 1 and point four can be contradictory. Is our current team good enough, but the club just aren't getting enough out of them? Perhaps. But something has got to change, one way or the other, before we'll progress.

That's the thing though - this isn't just based on one game. To suggest that is utterly ridiculous. The last central defender we signed was Marc McAusland in 2010. Is that acceptable, in your eyes, when our defence clearly hasn't been good enough for three seasons now? It's not just one game. It's a whole fecking load of games.

I think the biggest frustration in all of this for me is he lack of awareness from Danny Lennon and others at the club on the areas we need to improve in our team - for the longer term and not just the odd loan signing to fill a gap. You could say that the signings of Isma and Newton pretty much won us the League Cup last year, but where is the long-term view? Who replaces them when they inevitably leave for bigger and better things? I'm so fed up of the soft goals we have given away pretty much since the first day Danny Lennon walked into this job. It's been glaringly obvious that it has to change for years now and it hasn't. In fact, if anything, it has got worse. Despite that, we've failed to sign one new centre back for a third successive summer. We've kept the same right back who's past his best. We've had a succession of left-backs - decent performers but all of whom we've failed to keep hold of - and we've lost the best keeper we had in years. Why did we need to sign Gary Harkins? What exactly does he bring to the table that McGowan/McLean/McGinn don't? Why have so many creative midfielders when we have one proven striker, who - let's face it - is in the twilight of his career, and no ball winners? We let Guy and Imrie go in the summer. But at least these guys could provide something of a back-up, and were much pacier/more energetic than Thommo. They were not particularly good, but they were better than having nothing at all, which is what we have now. If we were going to make one 'key' signing in the summer, a Harkins-type player was the last thing that we needed. A centre/right back, goalkeeper, ball-winning midfielder or striker would have been higher up the list. So we may bring in Newton and Campbell. Good additions, possibly, but where does that then leave us in six months, a year's time? Back at square one, possibly even further back than that. Probably without McGowan. Possibly without McGregor, depending on how he recovers and performs. Possibly (or should that be probably) without Teale and Thompson. And definitely without an experienced keeper. So that's no playmaker, no winger, no right back, no goalscorer, no goalkeeper, another defender down and possibly more should other circumstances arise (not to mention the fringe players out of contract). Where is the long-term vision here? We have a couple of good youngsters - McGinn, Reilly - but who else do we have that's proven they're good enough for our first team? Even Reilly is still to prove that he is capable of being a Premiership player on a consistent basis - not a fault of his own, as he was injured last year, but still a fact. And while it's great that we have these guys, where is the goalscoring talent we've produced ourselves? Where's the centre back or the goalkeeper we've developed through the youth ranks? We have a habit of producing talented midfielders, but we have next to nothing elsewhere. We haven't had that for years. That is concerning for the future of our football club. A John McGinn or Kenny McLean emerging once every two or three years is not an indication of a successful youth system. It's a reasonably successful midfield production line. We did very well to come into the SPL and then stay up in our first season, seemingly against all odds. Since then, we've had a major helping hand - due to unusual circumstances - in avoiding relegation. This season might be the same. However, that isn't just 'our level' and I hate people saying that it is. 'Our level' doesn't really exist any more, as teams like Ross Co, St J, ICT have proven. Your level is as high as you want it to be, as long as you can do what you need to do to achieve that. We're constantly told that top six is our ambition; so when other clubs around us are achieving that, and we are not, surely that has to be seen as failure? If we're not making our targets, why are changes not forthcoming? Why are we not implementing the changes we need to achieve that, within our means? Is this the very best we can do? While teams around us build on the squads they have, we are left scrambling around to fill numerous positions in our team at the last minute. People say this is the perfect year to consolidate with Hearts being deducted 15 points; does that mean we weren't confident enough in our own potential last year to think we were able to do anything other than fight another relegation scrap with a weak Dundee team? I'm not naive enough to think St Mirren can be a top four/five/six team consistently, year on year, for a long period of time. Ross Co, St J, ICT etc. will have their fall again. But we haven't even been there once. We have never looked like being there once. I want to know what our excuse is for that. St J finished third last year with a team which included a player we let go for not being good enough, and another of our former players who many didn't believe to be good enough. That not only tells us that we're not getting the best out of certain players, but that we CAN sign the standard of player required to get us to that kind of level. I'm just not sure we have the standard of manager or coaching staff to get us there.

I have nothing great to add to this debate apart from this: Since the start of last season - a year ago - we have won 9 league games. To put that into context, we've won 6 cup games in that same time. We've played 47 games in total. In fact, let's look a bit further back. In the previous 30 games to that, we won 7 games... 2 of those were in the cups. So, since November 19, 2011, we have played 77 games. We've won 14 league games in that time and 8 cup matches. The basic fact is that we seem far more able to get ourselves up for - and win - cup matches than we do league ones. And remember, some of those cup matches would have been against lower-league opposition. The league statistics are hugely worrying, IMO. And in fact, if you look back over the past two seasons, we've actually won 18 league games in total and 10 cup matches. That's out of about 95 games. That includes our much-lauded start to the 2011/12 season. Is that kind of league form good enough? I think our cup exploits have masked a serious under-performance in league matches for a long time now. For all those who are claiming this to be a kneejerk reaction - look at the stats. They speak for themselves. Go back several months and you'll find concern after concern about our woeful league form. It's not kneejerk, it's the continuation of what many of us have said for a long time. Whether it's our mentality, a lack of talent or tactics - we do not perform in the league as we do in the cups - and something has to change before it lands us back in the second tier, where we will have neither the team or the finances to even compete in the cups.