FANS FED UP WITH YET ANOTHER DEFEAT

It’s been a long sharp fall from the heights of last week’s victory over Aberdeen. A fall which had the extremely hard landing of Livi picking up six points through the week.

As you all no doubt know, we are now level on points with Livi at the bottom of the SPL. Four wins in 28 league games. Dundee are two points in front of us, and the Pars four in front of us.

9 Dunfermline 28 (-15) 26
10 Dundee 28 (-26) 24
11 Dundee Utd 28 (-16) 22
12 Livingston 28 (-25) 22

Our next five games are:

Killie (away)
Celtic (home)
Hibs (away)
Rangers (away)
Hearts (home)

I don’t wanna sound like a doom and gloom merchant, but you have to say that we won’t be favourites to win any of these, though we are capable of picking up a few points.

The others around us have tough run-ins too, but on paper ours is probably the hardest. My prediction is that all will pick up a few points and the situation won’t be much clearer come the split. I can see maybe one of these four going on a good run and pulling clear perhaps, maybe another club could have a terrible run and join the battle, who knows, but I think all these four realise they are the ones being talked about for relegation.

On to United then – and what is going wrong that we can’t string two results together? We positively flowed against Aberdeen in the cup, and nothing since. I’ve no answers, I wish I did, but McCall, or whoever ends up with the job, needs to drag the team into a performance that actually leads to a victory, in fact I’ll pluralise that to victories. We also lose a lot of goals at crucial times – taking too long to settle and being undone. Both goals yesterday were in minutes of the kick-off to either half, and we’ve been apt to do this in other games too. Same applies to late goals. I think everyone at the club needs to address this fully, especially the players, and we have some good intelligent players so we should be at least able to bloody concentrate when the whistle goes!

The big talk of course is of McCall, but if I started on that subject I’d never stop. Suffice to say that plenty of fans are unhappy with results, with many simply demanding that he resigns. Others think it may be more prudent to not ‘rock the boat’ at the current time.

I don’t think anyone is demanding that he stays.

This of course throws up the prospect of a very interesting derby, some time after mid-April. It might not be the make-or-breaker, but the points will be vital, unless of course it’s settled by then. The permutations are endless. One possible scenario could see us relegated, skint, and a wee run Europe next season from the first division!! I’d rather win the cup and stay up, but as I say, anything could happen.

Our hope lies in knowing that we can play well at times, have good players, and a team and staff who I believe really want to do well. They’re not doing well mind, awful in fact.

Again McCall tried Dodds in midfield, to boos from the Arabs in attendance, and we lost the game. I thought we might lose 2 or 3-nil this week, and that’s what happened. Everyone knew Aberdeen were gonna be harder to beat on Wednesday, and they were. Is anyone surprised at what happened yesterday? The only surprise recently was how well we played against Aberdeen last week in the cup!

One bright spot amongst all this is the fact that we still, on paper at least, can still win a trophy this season – and I mean that in a ‘it ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings’ kind of way. We’re the outside bet of the last four, but we’re still in there, with the added bonus of a victory in the semi against Hibs being possibly good enough for Europe in itself.

The league is more important though, and we need to start grinding out performances, goals, and most importantly points. Anything we can get before the split will be a bonus, and one or even two points chiselled from our next five games could make all the difference. A victory and three points in any of these would be immense.

Another irony amongst all this is that Falkirk may well win their league and McCall might end up swapping places and leagues with the club he left to join us.