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Archie Interview


Winter of '63
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Archie was a guest on Radio Scotland  Sportsound tonight - he made some interesting comments in his usual measured way:-

Things went wrong at the last January Window as the injured players he was relying on did not play to the standard expected.

Team Spirit had been one of the main strengths with 10 or 11 players he could rely on...until last season.

He should have left at the end of the season...things had changed with a new Board...his sacking was "just football"

He was surprised that Erskine had been allowed to leave and contradicted the interviewer's suggestion that he was not the right type of player for a fight

Thistle were 2 points behind Dundee United when he left...he is surprised that they were now bottom and they should be doing better with the players they had

He expected that Caldwell would have brought in more players but accepted that it might be that Caldwell had to get rid of his signings

His recruitment this season was hampered by not being able to get rid of 3 players (presumably Barton, Storey & Keown) he told at the end of last season could leave

He didn't get the chance to speak to Shrewsbury because the Board delayed giving permission.

His best moment with Thistle was the win at Tynecastle to stay up - better than winning promotion.

 

 

 

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8 minutes ago, Winter of '63 said:

Archie was a guest on Radio Scotland  Sportsound tonight - he made some interesting comments in his usual measured way:-

Things went wrong at the last January Window as the injured players he was relying on did not play to the standard expected.

Team Spirit had been one of the main strengths with 10 or 11 players he could rely on...until last season.

He should have left at the end of the season...things had changed with a new Board...his sacking was "just football"

He was surprised that Erskine had been allowed to leave and contradicted the interviewer's suggestion that he was not the right type of player for a fight

Thistle were 2 points behind Dundee United when he left...he is surprised that they were now bottom and they should be doing better with the players they had

He expected that Caldwell would have brought in more players but accepted that it might be that Caldwell had to get rid of his signings

His recruitment this season was hampered by not being able to get rid of 3 players (presumably Barton, Storey & Keown) he told at the end of last season could leave

He didn't get the chance to speak to Shrewsbury because the Board delayed giving permission.

His best moment with Thistle was the win at Tynecastle to stay up - better than winning promotion.

 

 

 

No mention that he did not want lawless despite the fact he could have made a big difference to us in this league?  

he may feel he was hampered by not being able to rid the club of those signings but he signed them in the first place giving them lucrative deals 

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12 minutes ago, Third Lanark said:

No mention that he did not want lawless despite the fact he could have made a big difference to us in this league?  

he may feel he was hampered by not being able to rid the club of those signings but he signed them in the first place giving them lucrative deals 

It was just a Sportsound interview not a senate hearing.

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27 minutes ago, Third Lanark said:

No mention that he did not want lawless despite the fact he could have made a big difference to us in this league?  

he may feel he was hampered by not being able to rid the club of those signings but he signed them in the first place giving them lucrative deals 

We didn’t really know of Barton when we signed him, but he was good for us that 1st season. Similar story with Keown. He was instrumental in helping us get into top 6 and the fans were clamouring for us to sign him the following season and when we did we thought it was a great bit of business.

A lot of fans also thought signing Storey was good business even beating St J for his signature.

 

 

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Just now, Lenziejag said:

We didn’t really know of Barton when we signed him, but he was good for us that 1st season. Similar story with Keown. He was instrumental in helping us get into top 6 and the fans were clamouring for us to sign him the following season and when we did we thought it was a great bit of business.

A lot of fans also thought signing Storey was good business even beating St J for his signature.

 

 

Think the problem was our chief executive didn’t deem it necessary to put relegation clauses into the contracts of Barton , Keown and Storey so they were still on Premier League wages in the Championship.

No idea what happened to that Chief Executive 

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59 minutes ago, Third Lanark said:

No mention that he did not want lawless despite the fact he could have made a big difference to us in this league?  

he may feel he was hampered by not being able to rid the club of those signings but he signed them in the first place giving them lucrative deals 

Did you think Storey was a bad or good signing? If he had worked out would you have been happy or unhappy that we put him on a good deal with strong retention built in?

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The January window was a complete farce. Only an idiot with zero football experience would expect about four players who have been out about 12 weeks to instantly come back firing on all cylinders. The fact he’s an ex player makes his decision to only sign a centre half to replace one who’s loan ended even more bonkers.

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10 hours ago, jlsarmy said:

Think the problem was our chief executive didn’t deem it necessary to put relegation clauses into the contracts of Barton , Keown and Storey so they were still on Premier League wages in the Championship.

No idea what happened to that Chief Executive 

Maybe they wouldn’t have come to us otherwise ?

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10 hours ago, Jordanhill Jag said:

And that includes promotion a top six finish and our longest stint in the SPL 

The top 6 finish was jammy. Besides that 'incredible achievement' should have seen us comfortably prolong our stint in the SPL. We signed nitriansky. In the end his luck ran out and the big teams like Livingston came back, proper top 6 contenders

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36 minutes ago, MonehJags said:

The top 6 finish was jammy. Besides that 'incredible achievement' should have seen us comfortably prolong our stint in the SPL. We signed nitriansky. In the end his luck ran out and the big teams like Livingston came back, proper top 6 contenders

If you're going to suggest that AA's greatest achievement was down only to luck (which I think is unfair), I would also suggest that last season he could also be partly put down to bad luck. Yes, there was mismanagement and mistakes (he admits as much). But the number of long term and short term injuries we had in the first half of the season was unreal, and undoubtedly cost us points. Seeing as we were ultimately relegated on goal difference, just one of these points could have made the difference. The sudden, catastrophic drop in form of player such as Barton, Keown and Osman (when he came back) would have been difficult to predict also.  

Archibald has 5 and half years of success and he achieved this largely because he was a decent manager. He always had his limitations (otherwise we probably would not have held onto him for more than a year or two). But like so many decent managers, for whatever reason, he lost his way. This should not tarnish what he did achieve.

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Archie is the past and overtime we will hopefully remember him for what was largely a succesful tenure.

The relevance of this interview to our current prediciment lies in his comments on Chris Erskine and our league position. You won't ever get a manager or player slating a fellow pro but the comments of Archie and Erskine's post on twitter are the nearest thing thing we're likely to hear publically that they don't think our manager is the right guy.

Now you can say "why should we take Archie and Erskine's comments as gospel" but when you take those with the managers previous record, public statements and our results it becomes an overwhelming body of evidence that Caldwell needs to GTF asap.

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1 hour ago, Duke Gekantawa said:

Seeing as we were ultimately relegated on goal difference, just one of these points could have made the difference. 

The second half of the season gave us plenty opportunities to get that extra point that would have kept us safe. Not conceding late goals to Dundee and Hamilton would have done it. Not losing to a lower league team in the playoffs would have done it. But he couldn’t do that. 

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8 minutes ago, Dark Passenger said:

Why do people insist on pushing this line? We were relegated because we couldn't beat Livi in a two-legged play-off.

It was both of these things, obviously.

In any case, I was simply attempting to provide a bit of balance to the suggestion that Archibald was lucky/fluky to get top 6 etc.. I simply recognize that a bit of bad luck played a part.  It wasn't that we finished cut adrift at the bottom, as is often the case, such that there is no way that you could point at luck playing a part.  I also fully recognise that mistakes and mismanagement also played a part. I don't think this is unreasonable.

Anyway, none of this matters now. I'll leave it there.

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5 hours ago, Big Col said:

The second half of the season gave us plenty opportunities to get that extra point that would have kept us safe. Not conceding late goals to Dundee and Hamilton would have done it. Not losing to a lower league team in the playoffs would have done it. But he couldn’t do that. 

Also, if we had got the penalty vs Celtic at the start of the season and scored - that would have done it. 

Thats 1 bad luck story to start setting off against those games you mention.

Best to get a balanced view

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