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Ross County v Celtic, Live updates

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  1. David66 on

    Gordybhoy64 – There is no need for personal attacks on Neil.

     

     

    As I say I have Genuinely not seen any, but now I will look out for them.

     

     

    I admired Neil and felt proud of him for what he went through in Fair Caledonia but he needs sacked and pronto.

     

     

    D :)

  2. blantyretim is praying for the Knox family on

    Lubo

     

    I’ve said the same for years , every manager since Martin ( when PL took over) said the same after every transfer window

     

    Reading from a script , we all know deep down our CEO and board are to blame for the shambles we are currently in..

     

    Our Chairman took a big hit in wages this year according to the accounts .. These people take a wage whilst living the life of luxury whilst expecting supporters who have lost jobs, been furloughed or had a reduced income to fork out substantial amounts of money because we are faithful through and through

     

     

    Charlatans every single one of them

  3. Aipple on

    The “the behind the scenes” comments are directed at PL.

     

     

    Lennon told him he had to speak out about refs and cheating, he didn’t so Lennon had his wee piece with the media. PL is gone. DD has told Lennon he is the man. He sees now how PL stifled and mislead many managers before.

     

     

    Nightmare scenario.

  8. Lubo we need you on

    AIPPLE on 21ST FEBRUARY 2021 10:56 PM

     

    Lubo we need you on 21st February 2021 10:33 pm

     

     

    Hey Apple (google it , its funny:))

     

     

    Can you expand ? perhaps I am too stupid or have consumed too much beer to understand ..

  10. jamesgang on

    Celtic failed to break through their own tightly-packed, 5 man midfield, against the team at the foot of the league.

     

     

    HH jg

  11. Coneybhoy on

    SFTB

     

     

    Your earlier comments about Lennon interview

     

     

    He only apologised to us when prompted by the Sky interviewer.

  12. Bhoy From The Boyne on

    !!BADA BING!! on 21ST FEBRUARY 2021 10:52 PM

     

    https://twitter.com/23sports_/status/1363607041965760523?s=24

     

     

     

    Radio Scotland nonsense.

     

     

    ———————

     

     

    Bada Bing,

     

     

    What to say about that interview!

     

     

    ST sales would halve if NL was to continue into next season. Surely the plc board aren’t that negligent.

     

     

    Can only trust they will do the right thing & inform NL they will be not be continuing his contract into next season.

     

     

    Announce it soon and hope we end Sevco’s unbeaten record this season while preventing them from clinching it at CP, should that possibility arise.

     

     

    Best wishes to NL but no person is bigger than the club.

  13. Go tell the Spartim on

    The only thing that springs to mind that would affect our season in such a drastic way is…….

     

     

    Couldn’t really think of one, maybe there were some serious threats to staff …. yada yada…. based on nothing at all except and excuse to diminish the impending sycophancy from Scodland for the New Huns first trophy

  14. notthebus on

    You could fit Dingwall population into the Green Brigade area at Parkhead.

     

     

    They shouldnt even be on the same pitch and yet they have now beaten us in league and cup

  16. Aipple on

    David66

     

     

    I’m not expecting that to play out. Recurring nightmare.

     

     

    ————–

     

     

    LUBO WE NEED YOU

     

     

    Arsenal dodged a bullet. 

  18. Aipple on

    Coneybhoy on 21st February 2021 11:12 pm

     

     

    Jamesgang

     

     

    With 1 striker, 4 no10s getting in each other’s way and an old man – who knew?

     

     

    ————

     

     

    True story, although I did chuckle when I read it.

  19. prestonpans bhoys on

    Said before, you know what to do, stop giving them money. We are back to 1994 and this is not a football club but a PLC money orientated leaches.

  21. The Onlooker on

    One neasure of poor ( or good ) coaching is how many goals you concede from set pieces. You have the chance to get all of your players, where they are supposed to be before the ball is kicked .

     

     

    We have worst record of goals conceded from set plays in the league !!!

     

     

    43%

     

     

    The Onlooker

  23. setting free the bears for Res. 12 & Oscar Knox on

    Coneybhoy

     

     

    The interviewer merely asked if Neil had a message for the support

     

     

    The apology was Neil’s and not prompted at all

     

     

    It’s all fluff anyway as people are only listening to find something they disagree with

     

     

    The real question is to find out from PL or DD why they are persisting with putting Neil through this

     

     

    It’s long past the time where it. was done to avoid encouraging the Green Brigade

     

    It’s not working as a holding position- not even 5 wins in row or 10 wins in a row would produce a fan rethink

     

     

    I can see no further purpose to this charade- get Shaun Maloney in now or even give Kennedy Strachan or Brown a caretaker role till May but Neil deserves to be taken out of our firing line

  24. markiebhoy on

    setting free the bears for Res. 12 & Oscar Knox

     

    Totally agree – actually feel sorry for Neil Lennon

     

    Being used and abused by our board

     

    Human Shield.

  26. quadrophenian on

    Hi DAVID66 – I don’t keep a list of names, comments, times etc (some do it seems) – and I miss a lot of posts, too – but I’m a sharp reader with pretty decent recall: as GORDY kinda attested, Neil has been dubbed and daubed with those kind of slurs and more.

     

     

    Thanks, to those bhoys who appreciated my earlier tuppenceworth. HH

  27. David66 on

    Prestonpans bhoys – you are of course correct but it’s hard as we take our wee grandson, we have 3 tickets between the family, I also get to go with my mate a lot when not taking the grandson.

     

     

    There are some games I miss and my son in law and my bhoy will take the wee fella but i pay the wee mans and 1 other.

     

     

    As I say you are right but I dong know how to say to a Celtic mad 8 year old your not going to the game.

     

     

    For instance he was out playing at our bit a wee cul de sac tonight and I text him the team at 6.30pm…. his reply What a team Granda, such naivety and blind support. 💚💚💚

     

     

    D :)

  30. Big Georges Fan Club - Hail, Hail, Wee Oscar on

    BIG GEORGES FAN CLUB – HAIL, HAIL, WEE OSCAR on 21ST FEBRUARY 2021 9:38 PM

     

    ERTATIC – away down your own hole

     

    ————-

     

     

    Apologies for that – I was out of order.

     

     

    HH

     

    BGFC

  31. David66 on

    Jamesgang that made me laugh.

     

     

    Incredible, Neil said at his presser after game he can’t change it now, what the heck does that mean, he is the manager.

     

     

    D :)

  32. Stephbhoy67 on

    To the celtic

     

     

    Gonna sign centrebacks that like to head and the ball and enjoy a tackle

     

     

    Gonna sign fullbacks, wingbacks and wingers that actually create width and hit the byline where they then crossing the ball.

     

     

    Let’s sign strikers that actually attempt to run onto crosses and onto through balls too.

     

     

    It would be nice to sign centremids that are willing to get stuck in and are willing to go beyond the ball and to get behind the ball too.

     

     

    We are slow predictable and easy to play against. The current approach seems to be everyone in a Celtic Jersey clusters around the man with the ball and then they try to play little Sharp passes around the corner etc which never comes off because there is no space ffs it’s not rocket science.

  33. David66 on

    It can only be that when it is mathematically impossible for us to win the league Neil will get the Rudd Gullit.

     

     

    D :)

  34. timhorton on

    Even Andy Walker said that the balance wasn’t right in the midfield to many play the same position.

     

     

    Was it me or did anyone else hear Crocker say in the late 80 mnt that Neil Lennon was sitting with his feet up.

  35. prestonpans bhoys on

    David66

     

     

    I understand that dilemma and have sympathy however that is what these charlatans will play on.

     

     

    I decided at the end of last season this was my last, with the resolution, 5 way agreement etc etc

     

    after 15 of paying for a ST and away games, thousands of pounds wasted on a corrupt setup and a board fixated on the necessity of the OF. Bugger them😯😕

  37. markiebhoy on

    Where my understanding goes is the situation regarding Turnbull

     

    He is 9th top scorer in Scotland and 6th for assists ( and has had Covid19)

     

    Yet Neil Lennon gives his place to Tom Rogic. Why? McGregor is also better in that

     

    position than Rogic. It makes absolutely no sense .

  38. David66 on

    Prestonpans bhoys – I know you are right, it’s a hard one, not for me but for the wee fella as his enthusiasm to attend could be lost forever and I know tgats what the board pray on for adults etc…

     

     

    D :)

  40. Aipple on

    Was off on the internet trying to find something to take my mind off two RCs.

     

     

    Read the blow. Fail to plan and all that? Wee bit of arrogance? Crazy for profit mindset? Nothing ever goes wrong in those scenarios does it? I shouldn’t relate the two but folks in Texas, THE POWER state are, well, you know.  

     

     

    ——————–

     

     

    Texas Failed Because It Did Not Plan

     

    What went wrong? The Lone Star State made three fundamental errors.

     

     

    ROBINSON MEYER

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    How could this have happened? For four days, millions of people in Texas—the so-called energy capital of the world—shivered in the dark, unable to turn the lights on or run their heaters during some of the coldest days in decades. At least 30 Texans have died so far, including a 75-year-old man whose oxygen machine lost power and an 11-year-old boy who may have perished of hypothermia. Desperate families have tried to stay warm by running generators and grills indoors, leading to more than 450 carbon-monoxide poisonings, many of them in children.

     

     

    Severed from electricity and bare to the frigid weather, Texas’s infrastructure suffered a kind of multisystem failure. Pipes began to burst inside homes. Cell networks went down, preventing people from calling 911. In Austin and elsewhere, so many people ran their pipes at a drip (in order to prevent them from freezing) that the water system depressurized, contaminating the supply and forcing residents to boil their water before using it.

     

     

    On Friday, about half of state residents were under some kind of water advisory, according to The Texas Tribune. And 33,000 homes and businesses still have no power.

     

    America’s second-largest state was brought to its knees by winter weather. How could this have happened?

     

     

    Here are three explanations. I won’t give away the ending, but they are many of the same issues that hampered the United States in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Too many crucial systems in this country are run on an ad hoc basis. A lack of planning, a reliance on just-in-time logistics, and a self-defeating trust in the profit motive are withering the American economy and way of life.

     

     

    1. It’s simple: Nobody planned for this. “We are not known for our winters here,”Joshua Rhodes, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute, told me. “We vastly underestimated how cold [it]—and how widespread that cold—could get in Texas.”

     

     

    The power grid is a titanic machine made of copper and steel, but it has to be played like a Stradivarius. At any moment, power plants must generate about the same amount of electricity that customers demand. An out-of-balance grid can burst into flame or break down. This week, some of Texas’s biggest cities saw overnight wind chills around zero degrees Fahrenheit; temperatures across the state did not pass the freezing mark for days. Three in five Texans warm their homes with electric heaters. Those heaters suddenly needed a lot of power: The system didn’t have that power, so it failed.

     

     

    This failure cascaded down the power lines. When the managers of Texas’s grid realized that they had too little power to meet demand, they told local transmission organizations—smaller grids that cover specific cities or regions—to begin rolling blackouts, Rhodes said. This is a standard move when electricity becomes scarce, but the outages are supposed to, as the name says, roll. In a normal rolling blackout, managers will cut electricity to a neighborhood, wait 45 minutes or so, then rotate it to the next neighborhood and restore power to the first. Nobody likes it, but at least everyone gets some power.

     

    But the “outages are not rotating” in Texas, Rhodes said. This is because the state was—again—unprepared. In an emergency, every local grid must keep the power running to certain key facilities, such as hospitals and 911 call centers. This week, when the local grids directed power to the circuits that serve those facilities, they used up all of the electricity they could distribute. In many cities, that critical infrastructure wasn’t entirely on the same grid circuit. So the blackouts never rolled: Some houses lost power for three days, and others, those lucky enough to be on the same grid circuits as hospitals, kept their heaters running the whole time.

     

     

    2. But this explanation begs the question: Why couldn’t Texas generate enough electricity?

     

     

    The Texas grid is named after the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the agency in charge of managing it. (Yes, reliability is in the name—making ERCOT perhaps the sole instance of oxymoronic metonymy in English.) ERCOT can keep the lights on during sweltering summer days, when Texans demand more than 70,000 megawatts of power. During this week’s coldest days, Texans demanded about that much power again, Rhodes said. Yet this time, the grid could deliver only about 40,000 megawatts. What happened?

     

     

    Texas politicians had an early explanation. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid,” Governor Greg Abbott told Fox News’s Sean Hannity this week. “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”

     

     

    In fact, a senior director at ERCOT now says that renewable-energy outages were the least important factor in the blackouts. And although wind energy underperformed ERCOT’s estimates on Monday, solar power actually overshot them. More important, the Texas grid collapsed because some 28,000 megawatts of coal, nuclear, and gas power went offline—about a third of ERCOT’s total capacity. ERCOT failed, because fossil fuels failed. And one fuel failed in particular: natural gas.

     

     

    “It reminds me of watching The Big Short,” Daniel Cohan, an engineering professor at Rice University, told me, of Texas’s natural-gas crisis. “You had the best and the brightest, the financial wizards of Wall Street, that knew how to put together a portfolio that was diversified.” But they didn’t foresee that a single massive crisis could tank the value of mortgages across the country simultaneously, taking their portfolios with it.

     

     

    Likewise, Texas “had a system that depended on one fuel alone, natural gas, to provide two-thirds of our supply when we needed it most in the winter,” Cohan said. Then “an Arctic blast hit all of our components at once,” and the energy system cracked apart like Lehman Brothers.

     

    Texas generates about half of its electricity by burning natural gas. Over the past few decades, companies have constructed a labyrinth of pipelines and fracking wells, smokestacks and export terminals; the tendrils of natural-gas infrastructure now span the length of the state, and reach thousands of feet underground. In a feat of just-in-time logistics, gas is delivered to power plants nearly at the moment that it’s combusted. Most gas plants do not buy fuel in advance, Rhodes said, and few keep on-site backup fuel, such as diesel, to run in case their pipelines break. In fact, the Lone Star State as a whole doesn’t maintain much natural-gas storage, because it treats the ground as its reserve: If it needs more gas, it can always drill.

     

     

     

    Nor is the power system the sole consumer of natural gas in Texas. During the winter, homes, hospitals, and offices pipe in the fuel to burn in heaters and boilers.

     

    This remarkable system was totally unequipped for a polar vortex. As temperatures plunged, the pipelines delivering gas to power plants froze and depressurized. At the same time, those homes, offices, and hospitals all claimed whatever meager gas was still available. A system built for summer was outmatched by winter—and Texas, sitting on one of the world’s largest natural-gas reserves, suffered a statewide run on gas.

     

     

    For energy experts who have sometimes looked past natural gas’s considerable downsides, the failure is striking. “The reliability of natural gas is supposed to be its selling point,” Cohan said. “We put up with minor earthquakes, fracking fluid, air pollution, methane leaks, and climate change because we need this ‘firm and reliable’ source.”

     

     

    What happened wasn’t so different from what struck FedEx, Charmin, and New York’s health-care system when the pandemic hit last year. There was enough toilet paper in America for everyone to buy it every few months, but not for everyone to buy it the same week. Just-in-time logistics, whether by pipeline or cargo ship, makes good economic sense; it’s cheaper than running a system with a little built-in slack. But it depends on tomorrow looking roughly like yesterday, and when something unusual happens—such as Texas freezing over—the system fails.

     

     

    When a shortage like this hits Lululemon, it means you can’t buy spandex bike shorts. When it hits the power grid, it means children freeze to death in their beds.

     

     

    3. Yet why didn’t someone plan for a natural-gas shortage? A wintertime run on supply was entirely foreseeable. Pipelines could have been ordered to winterize; power plants could have maintained on-site backup. The natural aspect of this disaster had precedent: Although Texas saw brutal temperatures this week, they were within the historical norm.

     

     

    Some researchers, including Cohan at Rice, have started to call Texas’s failure an “energy-governance problem.” This is a shorthand way of saying that society’s plans didn’t make sense, because they assumed that natural gas could do an impossible number of things at the same time. And nobody noticed this beforehand, because it was nobody’s job to notice.

     

     

    In 1999, Texas restructured its power sector, dumping its old utilities and adopting in their place a new and totalizing market system. But this market looks little like the markets we know from everyday life. Consumers cannot buy electricity like it’s breakfast cereal or sell it like a used car. Instead, Texas has a market only a lawyer could love: a legalistic, mechanistic auction between power plants and distribution companies, funded with consumers’ utility bills.

     

     

    In this market, ERCOT is less an administrator than an auctioneer. Governor Abbott vowed this week that Texas would “investigate what lapse of judgment ERCOT had with regards to preparing for this situation”—but as he likely knows, ERCOT judges in the same way that eBay judges who will take home this Walker, Texas Ranger varsity jacket. When Texas needs more power, the price of electricity on ERCOT’s market increases. For days this week, it approached $9,000 per megawatt-hour. (A megawatt-hour is enough to power several hundred homes. In Washington, D.C., where I’m writing this, electricity currently costs about $34 a megawatt-hour.)

     

     

    Those high prices are supposed to drive power-generation capacity online. They didn’t—because of the ice-locked equipment and natural-gas crunch. “The price could’ve been a million dollars a kilowatt-hour, but you can’t supply with gas you don’t have,” Cohan told me.

     

     

    Yet as the market foundered, those generators that survived made a killing. By one measure, ERCOT power plants have made more already this year than they made in the past three years combined. Meanwhile, customers are suffering. In four days, the city of Denton paid $207 million for electricity—which is more than it pays in a typical year, the Wall Street Journal reporter Tim Puko has found. When Texas’s power market does allow consumers to join as market participants, it does so through start-ups, such as Griddy, that give consumers unfettered access to wholesale ERCOT power prices. Most of the time, Griddy consumers pay alluringly low prices—except, this week, some found themselves owing $2,500 a day.

     

     

    At the core of ERCOT’s structure is a total trust in markets, says Leah Stokes, a political-science professor at UC Santa Barbara. To design a system such as ERCOT, “you have to believe that markets are better at coordinating than centralized planning,” she told me.

     

     

    Whatever the virtues of that hope, they were not borne out this week. The city of El Paso has its own utility, separate from ERCOT’s market system. That utility maintained power while ERCOT drowned. Why? After a winter storm swept through Texas in 2011, El Paso planned for future cold-weather disruption by winterizing its natural-gas infrastructure. ERCOT did not. Nor did the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates power generation statewide, mandate such preparedness.

     

     

    In short, the Texas government assumed that high prices alone could guarantee grid reliability and incentivize power plants to prepare for the worst. This didn’t happen. The market failed.

     

     

    This failure reminds me of what I observed while reporting on America’s COVID-19 testing failure. For months last year, the federal government failed to adequately plan and pay for the industrial-scale production of COVID-19 tests. It assumed that high demand for tests would lure companies to join the market. But no individual private firm had an incentive to risk short-term stability for potential medium-term profit. So the country went months without sufficient tests.

     

    Texas’s crisis reveals, too, how independence, a praiseworthy trait in postcolonial states and precocious children, is less laudable in the power sector. Rick Perry, the former secretary of energy and Texas governor, implied this week that his old constituents should prefer the blackouts over federal control. “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” he said. He is more correct than he may have realized. After that 2011 winter storm, the federal government actually did require Texas power plants to draw up plans for how they would avert a worse disaster, Rhodes, the UT researcher, said. But it had no ability to enforce those plans, and power plants seemingly put them aside.

     

     

    The power grid is modern society’s life-support system. Everything on which daily survival now depends—clean water, refrigeration, medical care, reliable communication, access to cash and banking—requires, to some degree, electricity. Every day, in a marvel of engineering and statecraft, a national network of wire delivers 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to Americans. Rome once united its territory by paving the Via Appia down Italy’s spine; the U.S. raises power lines.

     

     

    This week, a Vietnam veteran died in his truck with his last tank of oxygen because he had no power. He deserved better. The power grid is a very large and important machine, but it is also an ennobling tool, a guarantor of solidarity and dignity. The grid grants a certain kind of freedom—freedom from darkness, freedom from cold or heat, even freedom from boredom. There is a freedom in knowing that anything you plug into the wall will turn on; there is a freedom, too, in knowing that your house will stay inhabitable and your pipes will not burst. Texas’s system is built on the idea that the liberty of companies to buy and sell electrons—and the freedom of consumers to pay a $2,500 power bill—is greater and more dear than any freedom wrought by consistent power service.

     

     

    Perhaps ERCOT’s strangest and most un-American trait is that it strips citizens of their democratic authority; instead of being able to hold someone accountable when the power goes out, Texans are told that the market, like a rain god, has failed again. You might say that ERCOT, in its majestic equality, allows rich and poor alike to think like an economist. Frankly, Texans have better things to do. Moreover, if the freedom to survive a snowstorm is worth protecting, if it is a freedom we owe to one another, it is a freedom worth planning for. Markets are good tools; they aren’t our only tools. Government by auction is no way to live. Indeed, Texans are dying of it.

  41. David66 on

    Aipple good luck as your senator Cruz (i think) of Texas acts like 1 of the Celtic board a complete twat.

     

     

    D :)

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