Livi v Albion Rovers

Credit to Darren Young for the way he set up his team and the way they executed their plan. They had a game plan and stuck to it all the way through to the final whistle. yes they have a poorer team but when you see performances like yesterday from this Livi team and compare them to some of the other performances this season it is obvious the team can sometimes be less than the sum of the parts. For that the manager must accept responsibility.

His formation was wrong in the first half - he changed it in the 2nd but failed to change the personnel. Mickey Miller was poor at right back - it would have been better if he had taken Cadden who hardly beat his man all day off and replaced him with Morgyn Neill and reshuffled the pack in front of the back 4.

Why were the players going inside all the time when they got to the last 3rd of the park when hitting the byline and cutting it back would have been a better option.

Why the lack of shooting when the goalkeeper demonstrated in the 1st half his inability to catch or save the ball.

The manager is clueless and his team is continually being undone by the same tactics, his substitutions are at best baffling and his tactical awareness is extremely poor. As for his motivation skills they are at best questionable.

The team lacks a leader in the dugout and on the pitch and too many guys know no matter how badly they perform they will continue to be picked

Many more performances like yesterday and there will be no swift return to the Championship, part time football will beckon and the initiative to get new fans through the gate on the back of the Community scheme will be a pointless exercise as people want to be entertained and yesterday's game was a long way from that.

I can accept seeing a team lose but not in the manner that yesterday's game was lost. There was no passion, no fight, no determination and the team was tactically naive for large parts of the game. As others have said where was the grandstand finish when the award of a very soft penalty offered up a lifeline.

We've got Alloa and Brechin in the next two games and six points from that will surely put us back to the top of the table? Yesterday was a write off but I think that was the game needed to make the team wake up and realise the challenge we've actually got to get out of this league which is trying to beat rigid teams like East Fife, Albion and Queens Park in the next 27 games.

I think it's time Hopkin starts looking more into his squad rather than sticking with the same 12 players who have been starting most of our games this season. Something clearly isn't working as we've only kept one clean sheet all season and that was against the worst team in the SPFL. The likes of Watt, Carrick, Neill and Sinclair must think they're wasting their time if they're only going to get brief run outs. I don't think a couple of changes will unsettle our squad as we've been playing different systems this season.

I'm by no means saying Hopkin is a great manager but I find it quite strange seeing people laud over Young and Ross as being good managers when Hopkin's Livi are/were* above both of them. If Ross is so good how come Hopkin was above his team when he left to go to St Mirren and beat him in a head to head at their own ground. He gets slated when we lose and no credit when we win, who'd be a manager!!

We're only a point off top spot and have a better GD than Brechin, it aint all bad. I'd say for the first quarter we're doing ok. These mid table teams will take points off Brechin and Alloa too, we were kidding ourselves on if we thought we'd go all season undefeated, i'm an eternal optimist and even I didn't think that would happen.

Another thing worth remembering is Gary Bollan's Livi with a lot better budget took till after January before moving away from the chasing pack, I doubt we'll do this with the budget and quality of squad we have compared to that one, it's going to be close all the way to the end between us and Alloa, maybe Brechin too, although I still believe we'll eventually pull away from them.

*Was above Alloa when Ross left them.

Football is all about opinions and I stick by my current views on Mr Hopkin. If he learns from his mistakes over the course of the season and keeps the team challenging right until the end of the season I may modify my views on him but until then the jury is still out in my book.

As for other managers I have never lauded Jack Ross but as I mention above I think Darren Young deserves praise for what he has done at Albion Rovers. In his 2 and a bit seasons in charge he has won promotion with his part time team brought them into League 1 and kept them there on a shoe string.

Hopkin has much more by way of resources than part time teams like Albion Rovers, amateurs like Queens Park and has a full time playing squad. Its not always about the resources you have its about how you get the best out of them and at this point in time the manager is not always getting the best out of his squad. Hopefully that changes as the season progresses.

LC - why has it taken 3 defeats by clubs considered "also-rans" before it's taken as a wake-up call?

Suggests to me the manager hasn't woken up yet

Bertie Bassett wrote:LC - why has it taken 3 defeats by clubs considered "also-rans" before it's taken as a wake-up call?

Suggests to me the manager hasn't woken up yet

I wasn't at the Queens Park or East Fife games so can't judge on how bad I felt we were. I've read that we were unlucky against Queens Park but it was a day against East Fife. The team's standards have been slowly slipping since the start of the season even though we've been winning games so maybe it just took one more defeat for him to actually realise that he might need to freshen the team up to get us back to how we played in the first couple of league games.

From what i've seen of the first 9 games (only missed the Peterhead away one), Alloa and Livi are much of a muchness, blew teams away to start with, lose the odd game and have started to scrape results, Brechin have lost to both Alloa and Livi but are set up better to scrape results from every other team in the league.
So on that basis we need to change our game slightly when we play the likes of Albion and East Fife, QP imo was just a case of playing wider and we'd beat them no problem, they weren't anywhere near as dangerous as the other two teams we lost to.

In Albions case we were missing Lithgow and it had a significant effect on our game, Miller didn't work defensively and we pushed up and got caught too many times on the counter, we needed to be a bit more patient against them and try to draw them out. we got sucked into their counter attacking tactics.

East Fife were similar to Rovers, in that they played quick direct attacking play, only it was balls hit right at us so we needed to deal with them better, just clear the lines, their strikers were on us in a flash so we couldn't afford to give them the opportunity to hustle the ball off us, just clear it.

These 3 teams all had good defences, and sat in more than other teams, so we need to get down the flanks and play with more width against them, we've got good wingers so we have the players to beat them. Also noticed QP are vulnerable at the back to set pieces, and we have 2 good players in the air, so that's another weakness we should be exploiting.

We'll see how Hopkin sets the team out the next time we play these teams though, you can't really judge a manager till we're 18 games in and played all the teams twice.

Can't judge a manager until after 18 games? He has had that last season plus the opening 9 this season plus cup ties. The early season promise has been diminishing week on week. He couldn't work out how to break down defensive teams last season and still hasn't at a lower level of competition. He sends out a team with 2 wingers and doesn't use the flanks. All of this points to someone who doesn't know what he is trying to do. I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and see what kind of stamp he put on his own team rather than the one he inherited but from a decent start we are rapidly going backwards.

Losing to QP could be dismissed as a blip, losing to East Fife and now Rovers means 2 losses in the last 3 league games and the common denominator in all 3 games is an inability to break down defensive set ups and employing questionable tactics. A large part of that has to fall on the manager.

In the same way we wont really have an idea where we'll be until we've played 18 games i'm sticking by that with Hopkin in charge, once we're at the halfway mark we'll have a good idea of how we'll do in this league. So far though we're only a point off top so why all the hysterics?

Don't tell me you were thinking we'd be top of the league Bertie, mr glass half empty.   I had no faith in Hopkin before the season started so he's doing a hell of a lot better than I thought he would. Nobody is going to win every game so I really don't see the panic just because we lost a game, we've beaten the top 2 teams in the league, and from what I've seen East Fife will cause teams problems at home. Don't think they had their keeper or Insall when Alloa played them so can see them taking points off Alloa in their next encounter. Albion are the in form team just now too, pisser for us that we got them when they've hit a purple patch.

Worth remembering that we had 18 points after 9 games when we won this league last time round.

Said about where we were under Bollan in this league too LL, was after January before we opened up a gap on teams and won it by about 22 points, and he had better players and a much bigger budget than Hopkin, and a bit of continuity from winning the 3rd division to build on.

We all know Hopkin has faults and is relatively new to managing a team, were any of us thinking he'd be perfect and win nearly every game, very much doubt it. But I don't see any other manager winning every game either, even the great Jack Ross got pumped when we played his team.