weeyin

And some of them, no doubt, in the "I don't care if we have to field a team of 16 year olds as long as we stop Sevco staying in the top flight" camp.

At 20, he is one of the youngsters. McCall obviously rates him and seems to like the fact he can inject some pace into the line-up. No offence, but I'll take his judgement over yours.

He's still listed as a first team player on the Official Site, but I don't know how current that is.

You might be right. Currently, we have Reid, Kerr, Ramsden, McManus, Hammell, ZFA, Cummins and Murray in the squad as defenders. So if we do bring in another body, we'll need to offload others I would think.

Kerr is more of a centre-half than he is full back. So we would be replacing like with like. TBH, if we were going to bring in any more new faces, I'd like to see them in the middle of the park.

We didn't play him in the first team, apparently, due the fee we would owe Celtic. However, he is probably the most natural talent in the U20s. JJ says he has "continental feet"!

Not the complete answer, but Thomas and Erwin will hopefully take care of at least part of the forward/winger piece. For centre half, I fully expect Kerr or Ramsden (or even Reid) to fill in there. Be surprised to see a new face.

I would google that, but I'm at work.

Not Lionel Ainsworth, surely? He had 100% definitely signed for an MLS team before the end of the season. I'm seriously starting to wonder if some the posts on here are just made up.

Careful. I was shouted down last season when I said it was disappointing to see him repeat the same mistake in the 2nd leg that he had made in the first. Apparently I was a moaner who should have accepted we were beaten by a better team. We'll miss him, but he needed to move on to take the next step up in his career.

If anyone takes a club charter on the basis of low price, then they are idiots. However, I suspect that most do it for the convenience, as not everyone can take 12 days off work to cycle to Albania.

That sounds like a great move for Hutch and gives him a decent shout at the EPL in the future. Also good to see that all the doom merchants who were convinced he was signing for Rangers were wrong (again).

The guy who made us the best in Scotland is still at the club, so I'm sure he can oversee whoever takes over.

The club tends to do its business in private, and its rare for anything to leaked to media before paperwork is signed and sealed. I prefer it that way, but it does make for a lot of idle speculation (and wild rumours) on sites like this.

I presume he was given a deadline the same as all the others with offers on the table.

See Ryan Stevenson has signed for Partick.

Imagine how much we could sell them for if we signed them up for 10 years (on deals we couldn't afford) and sold them after 5.

Questions have been asked (and answered) about our finances. We lost out on Rangers/TV/League sponsorship/Cup run money and cut our budgets back in consecutive seasons to reflect that. The board has been pretty open about the books and what avenues are being explored to bridge the financial gaps. You (and I) might not like all the answers, but they are available.

You remember correctly.

If that was true, then at least one of them would have gone on to a higher (or even equal level) to us after we released them. I don't remember that ever happening - which was kinda my original point.

It's not short term gain though, it has been medium term losses. The cold hard facts of our accounts the last couple of seasons don't lie. All these games where we have let kids in for free and had cheap tickets have not stopped us from running at a loss. I'm sure the club would much prefer it if we had more TV money and a league sponsor, but failing that, our major revenue stream is our gate money. If I was going to pay a few quid extra I'd rather do it for a Euro game than an Accies or St. Mirren game. If there was an easy answer to boost our funds and lower ticket prices, every club would be over it like a rash.

And that's not good - no disagreement there. If we need to turn a profit this season, though, and we are relying largely on gate money to do it, ticket prices like this are inevitable.

There's also the risk that we get papped out, so need to balance making money on one tie versus a run of two (or three?) home Europa games.

No better than any other of the guys we released that seem to give folk the fear. Lawless being the most recent example.

Whether we regard it as being fleeced or not, our finances aren't great right now and that is partly due to the Rangers situation. When we all voted to keep them out the SPFL, we knew we would take a financial hit and everyone at the time was on board with how that could affect prices. Well, here we are, runing at a loss the last couple of seasons, still without a league sponsor, and having recently lost the 2 Edinburgh clubs to the Championship. It's not ideal, but if a few quid extra is helping out the club, then it's fair enough.