The summer transfer window - a question for every Premiership club

Aberdeen: how hard will this window hit them?
Graeme Shinnie has gone. Gary Mackay-Steven has gone. Max Lowe's loan spell has finished. And Celtic are sniffing around Scott McKenna again. It felt like the Dons took a small step backwards last season, and the same could happen this time around unless Derek McInnes has some decent signings up his sleeve - Craig Bryson counts as one, though on last year's showing James Wilson wouldn't.


Celtic: do they have a plan?
There may well have been a bit of gamesmanship involved in the David Turnbull saga, but there's a danger of the whole "magnificent offer" malarkey becoming the club's Concomitant moment. More concerning was the leaking of the team's transfer plans for the summer, partly because it was leaked and partly because the names were either uninspiring or unrealistic.With Kieran Tierney being courted by Arsenal and ex-messiah Brendan Rodgers sniffing around Callum McGregor, there's a risk of significant upheaval - exactly what the Neil Lennon appointment was designed to minimize. As for loan signings, West Brom's criticism of how Lennon treated Oli Burke might put other clubs off sending their youngsters to Parkhead.


Hamilton: does everyone really want to play for Brian Rice?
The theme of Accies' offseason seems to be that every new signing waxes lyrical about the skills of the club's Head Coach. Rice had a strong reputation as an assistant manager but the way some of his players are talking seems to suggest he's Pep Guardiola. To be fair though Hamilton's results, performances and style improved after he took over in January - though that wasn't hard given the rut Martin Canning left them in. If he has a squad that buys into his ethos then Hamilton's chances of avoiding a relegation battle are far better.


Hearts: what's their philosophy?
Hearts were unfairly lambasted for being a physical, long ball team last season. The truth is that their best stuff came when they were a physical long ball team, but they didn't play like that enough. Their spirited cup final performance seems to have bought Craig Levein a bit of breathing space but he's got to do better than sixth in the league with the resources he has available. One option is to gamble on the talented youngsters he has available; there are 18 players on Hearts' books who are under 21 but have played for the first team already, and Aaron Hickey, Harry Cochrane, Callumn Morrison and Anthony McDonald look particularly special. But does Levein - and the Tynecastle support - have the patience to deal with the inevitable ups and downs that would come with throwing in the kids?


Hibernian: is Heckingbottom a good recruiter?
There's been a high turnover at Easter Road, which is out of necessity - they had a ton of loan players - rather than because Paul Heckingbottom specifically wanted to bring in his own squad. And apart from Stephane Omeonga and Marc McNulty Hibs have only lost fringe players. But there's a significant lack of depth, particularly up front which needs corrected. Basically if Hibs are to push on they need to either find a new McNulty (or retain the old one) or hope Flo Kamberi gets his mojo back.


Kilmarnock: what does Alessio have in mind?
The appointment of Angelo Alessio is exciting, but Killie have essentially lost a month's worth of recruitment time and currently have just one striker on the books. Given his experience and contacts it wouldn't be a surprise if the Italian manager looked to the continent for new players; Killie fans live in hope that Antonio Conte might offer up some of his Internazionale youngsters on loan! In the meantime there's only two weeks before the clash with the mighty Connah's Quay Nomads...


Livingston: are they heading for second season syndrome?
Livi massively overachieved last season given their small budget, but faded drastically after their strong start - they won just 3 of their last 21 games. And they go into the new campaign without goalkeeper Liam Kelly, centre-backs Craig Halkett and Declan Gallagher and midfielder Shaun Byrne - for me, four of their best five players last year (Scott Pittman is the other). Whilst the signings they've made fit very much into the club's system, it will be hard to replicate the defensive solidity that got them so far last season and which compensated for the lack of a goal threat (Halkett was the joint top scorer in the league!). Are they on the slide?


Motherwell: how should they spend the Turnbull cash?
The windfall that the 'Well will receive for David Turnbull - apparently £2.8million plus add-ons - is approximately half the club's annual turnover. It will be interesting to see how much gets put back into the playing squad budget. In recent times they have been financially prudent and they will doubtless know that splashing the cash on new players and big wages will come back to bite them. And Stephen Robinson has already made six signings in this window. On the flipside there is now a fifteen-goal-shaped-hole in the centre of midfield that needs filled.


Rangers: can they get any return on their dead wood?
Eros Grezda, Kyle Lafferty, Graeme Dorrans, Jason Holt, Eduardo Herrera, Joe Dodoo, plus surely one of the backup keepers...anyone else in Rangers' bloated squad that they are desperate to get rid of? (edit - Jordan Rossiter, it turns out) The trouble with everyone knowing the players are surplus to requirements is that getting any sort of fee for them is rather hard. But the Gers' early dealings seem to suggest that there won't be a repeat of the big spending of the last two summers unless they raise the money through sales. And flogging Alfredo Morelos and/or James Tavernier would come with significant risk.


Ross County: are they actually getting stronger?
County have shown loyalty to the squad that got them promoted by signing nearly all of them on for another year. When you have the support of someone like Roy McGregor, you can afford to do that even if it costs you later. But one would expect new signings to upgrade the starting eleven. Instead we have Joe Chalmers and Blair Spittal, neither of whom are better than what the Staggies already have in their positions, and two goalkeepers in Chelsea loanee Nathan Baxter and Hibs no.3 Ross Laidlaw, who are probably not an improvement on Scott Fox. Surely there will be more new faces, but they need quality, not depth.


St. Johnstone: can they get a goalscorer?
Only once in the last five years has a Saintee got into double figures for league goals. Whilst that wasn't such a huge factor when Steven Maclean was linking up play and helping set them up for teammates, Tommy Wright can't call on anyone of that calibre just now. Chris Kane is willing but hasn't developed as well as hoped, Callum Hendry is still raw and David McMillan is a bust. The trouble is, everyone wants a striker who can score goals; can Wright find one and convince him to come to Perth?

St. Mirren: what the hell is going on?
At the time of writing, Oran Kearney is on the brink of being punted, allegedly because he insists on commuting from Norn Iron. That would leave the Buddies looking for their eighth manager in five years just a few weeks before the League Cup games start. To make matters worse they have relatively few players under contract and this fiasco will hold up further signings; Mihai Popescu had turned up for training on Monday but doesn't know if he'll actually be kept on or not. This shambles will be very difficult for Kearney's successor to rectify.


Lawrie Spence has whinged about Scottish football on Narey's Toepoker since September 2007. He has a life outside this blog. Honestly.

Scotland's strengths and weaknesses

Steve Clarke's first couple of games in charge will have given him an idea of what he has to work with. In some areas he is pretty well off, but in others he's either going to have to hope some players really improve or he's going to have to compensate for the deficiencies. Here's how his options look at each position, going from our strongest area to our weakest...


LEFT-BACK
Greg Taylor did himself proud in Brussels with a tenacious, committed performance. He's got a bright future ahead of him...as Scotland's third choice at the position. That's how spoilt we are for left-backs. Captain Andrew Robertson will of course be the starter whenever he has two working legs.

MIDFIELD
Against Cyprus, we could field John McGinn and Kenny McLean, both of whom will be first choices for Premier League clubs next season, and Callum McGregor, arguably the best player in Scotland over the last two years. For the Belgium match in came Manchester United's Scott McTominay and, in a more advanced role, Stuart Armstrong of Southampton. For future matches where an attacking playmaker is needed, Clarke will be able to call upon Tom Cairney - who, going by his willingness to come along just to be a sub, clearly had a beef with Alex McLeish - and Ryan Christie, who missed this double-header with injury. There's also John Fleck, promoted to the English top flight with Sheffield United and who understandably declined to postpone his wedding for this round of games. We may not have an absolute world class talent, but we are pretty stacked at this position.

OUT WIDE
The setup against Cyprus shows that Clarke is not wedded to the 4-4-2/4-4-1-1 that worked so well for him at Kilmarnock - which is just as well as the pace and dribbling of Ryan Fraser and James Forrest are our two best attacking assets. The caveat is that there is not a lot of depth; Johnny Russell started wide against Belgium because of his fresh legs and willingness to do defensive work, while Robert Snodgrass and Matt Ritchie remain out of the international picture and Matt Phillips has disappeared from contention.

GOALKEEPER
David Marshall justified his recall and is probably an adequate option going forward. But I don't blame Clarke for trying to convince Jed Steer of Aston Villa and Angus Gunn of Southampton to join the fray. I also don't blame him for not rushing to anoint Scott Bain as first choice. The best case scenario is that Liam Kelly, still only 23, continues to blossom when he leaves Livingston this summer.

RIGHT-BACK
At the moment, the choice is between natural right-back Stephen O'Donnell (or Liam Palmer, though all I've seen of him was that Kazakhstan debacle), former right-back Callum Paterson who now plays his club football in midfield or up front, or shoehorning Kieran Tierney into this position. I personally don't mind the latter, but an awful lot of folk disagree. Regardless, none of the options are ideal.

CENTRE-BACK
The potential is there; Scott McKenna and John Souttar clearly have bright futures, while Stuart Findlay thoroughly deserved his call-up and David Bates hasn't disgraced himself when called upon. All four are 23 or under. What odds that two of them can step up and become the type of central defender Scotland used to have loads of in the eighties and nineties? In the meantime, Clarke has felt obliged to insert Charlie Mulgrew into the lineup as much for his experience as anything else, and will also fancy that he has the tactical nous to cover up some of the deficiencies in the backline. Oh, and this is another position I can see Tierney end up playing in...

STRIKER
Given the time constraints, it's so much easier to coach an international team to defend than to attack. And so having a centre forward who can do it on his own can make a middling side so much more dangerous - think Gareth Bale of Wales or Robert Lewandowski of Poland. In the last two matches Scotland played...Eamonn Brophy and Oli Burke. Brophy was a 'devil you know' option who knows exactly what Clarke wants from his front men, which is great in terms of defending from the front but he offered zilch in attacking threat. Burke gave us a microcosm of his career so far; twenty excellent minutes against Cyprus where he looked dangerous and showed his full array of physical attributes followed by a start against Belgium where he looked like a headless chicken and justified concerns about his football IQ with a series of bad decisions. He's still only 22; surely there's a player there?

As for the others, the best long-term hope might be Oli McBurnie who scored 22 goals in the Championship last season, but in the immediate future Steven Fletcher's experience and quality link-up play may make him first choice. Alternatively, Leigh Griffiths may come back from his absence as sharp as he was two years ago. But sadly the most likely outcome is that Scotland are going to have to look to other areas of the team for goals.


Lawrie Spence has whinged about Scottish football on Narey's Toepoker since September 2007. He has a life outside this blog. Honestly.

Talking points from the Cyprus game

We won
This is the most important thing to take away. Realists would acknowledge that Steve Clarke has had barely any time at all to get the hang of this international management malarkey and has been denied the luxury of training camps and friendlies to get his ideas across before competitive action; therefore a lack of cohesion was inevitable.

You don't find many realists in football crowds though, as the half-time jeers indicated. The Tartan Army's patience has long been exhausted and just because Clarke was a popular choice didn't mean that they would tolerate toiling against a country ranked 89th in the world by FIFA. The victory may not have been convincing but it's the same number of points as we'd have got by thumping them. And it largely shields Clarke and a squad low on morale and belief from further pressure and criticism. With the trip to Brussels on Tuesday something of a free hit - nobody expects a positive result there - the focus can now move onto the next round of matches in September and, realistically, building a team that can win the Nations League playoffs and qualify for Euro 2020 that way.


A decent striker would make the world of difference
Having a world-class striker that opponents need to plan for can make such a difference - just look at Poland (Robert Lewandowski) or Wales (Gareth Bale). Scotland simply don't have that; here they also missed Steven Fletcher, Leigh Griffiths and Oli McBurnie who all might have fancied themselves as the starting centre-forward had they been fit. The obvious logic to picking Eamonn Brophy was that Clarke likes his attackers to defend from the front and as a Kilmarnock player Brophy could do that job without a second thought. And he did it fine.

The problem was that 'the wolf' offered no bite. Apologists will say he was starved of service but in truth Brophy struggled to get even half a yard of space on his markers in open play and when he did so he was generally offside. James Forrest and, in the second half, Ryan Fraser got into plenty of dangerous positions but Brophy was never in a position to feed off them. He was, sadly, out of his depth.

Whilst he was up against tired legs, Oli Burke looked so much brighter, linking up play with intelligent headers and stretching the game with his pace. Even before his goal he looked like someone had hooked him up to an intravenous drip of confidence before coming on. This was the Burke we've been waiting for ever since RB Leipzig paid £15million for him, but he needs to do it for more than twenty minutes to become a viable first choice up front.


At least there was a clear plan and shape
Coming up with a plan of attack is so much harder for a coach than getting the defence organized - and even more so at international level because of the lack of time available to work with players. But even at this early stage the difference between McLeish's Scotland and Clarke's Scotland was night and day. The attackers and midfielders clearly knew their roles without the ball and once the first ten minutes had passed and they had adjusted to Cyprus' surprise decision to play a back three the home side completely controlled the game. Unlike during his predecessor's tenure, it was also clear that the boss had done his homework; I was perturbed by the lack of defensive midfielder in the lineup, but Clarke clearly anticipated that there would be few defensive responsibilities needed in that area and so deployed a more technical player, Kenny McLean, in that position.

Clarke also made important changes at half-time, instructing Callum McGregor to get higher up the pitch and encouraging Ryan Fraser to carry the ball instead of crossing early. These contributed significantly to the improved second half performance.


Cyprus never actually looked much like scoring
Yes, I know that sounds daft given that they did score but David Marshall made one save in each half and could have spent long periods leaning on the post doing Su Doku puzzles. I was supremely confident that we'd see it out at 1-0 because the players looked like they knew exactly what they were doing and actually looked more likely to score than Cyprus did. And whilst they were let down by a rare lapse by Andrew Robertson, who blotted his copybook by losing his marker at a corner, the back four looked really comfortable in open play. Scott McKenna had arguably his best game in a Scotland shirt, undoubtedly helped by having an experienced partner in Charlie Mulgrew.


What next?
The next four qualifiers are Belgium away, Russia at home, Belgium at home, Russia away. Ooft. It's certainly not all that unlikely we won't win any of them - and even if we do the chances of finishing second in the group are minimal unless we can get four points or more off at least one of those two teams. Realistically the onus has to be performance rather than results, with next spring the priority. Rome wasn't built in a day.


Lawrie Spence has whinged about Scottish football on Narey's Toepoker since September 2007.  He has a life outside this blog.  Honestly.

Can McPake take Dundee back up?

At the end of April, as relegation - and the departure of Jim McIntyre - became increasingly certain, Dundee issued a statement on their website to reassure fans about the present and the future. Among the topics touched upon was the process used to appoint McIntyre.

"This process starts with consulting our continuously maintained working list of potential candidates for analysis of multiple criteria. This list is purely statistical, allowing us to see how many games have been managed, at what level, and what the win percentages are at that time.  Then we start to rank the managers based on those criteria.  Recently we had changed our philosophy of bringing on younger, inexperienced managers to ones that have had over 300 matches in charge and a win percentage at a level around 40%.  We then take into account what else they have achieved, saving clubs from relegation, winning trophies and how they have managed their recruiting process."

Following McIntyre's exit, Managing Director John Nelms confirmed that, essentially, the next manager would be recruited using similar criteria. That is presumably how the club came to the conclusion that John Robertson should be invited to interview; according to Caley Thistle they approached Robertson first - who turned them down then grassed them up to his employer - and then felt the need to phone Caley Thistle the next day anyway to ask for permission, which was of course declined.

On the one hand that account should be taken with a pinch of salt, as ICT's new Chief Operating Officer has 'history' with Dundee. But their cackhanded attempt to recruit St. Mirren's Jack Ross two summers ago - having ignored the Buddies' objections, they flew out to Spain to meet him on holiday, and he rebuffed them - suggests that there may be a grain of truth in there.

And so from that criteria and a huge number of applicants, the Dark Blues have appointed...Academy coach James McPake, who currently has one match under his belt as a manager (as caretaker for the last game of the season) and a win percentage of zero.

Whether McPake was even the first choice is open to debate. It has been reported that Dundee had agreed compo with Alloa for Jim Goodwin, who did a frankly extraordinary job to keep the part-time Wasps in the Championship last season and who certainly deserves a crack at a full-time job. But rumour has it that Goodwin pulled out because the club were not happy that he wanted to keep his assistant from Alloa rather than appoint 'an experienced head' to work with him.

Given that McIntyre undoubtedly suffered from not having his preferred number two Billy Dodds beside him due to a fan backlash over Dodds' history with the club, it would certainly be interesting if the board chose to interfere in this way. Regardless, McPake has ended up with Jimmy Nicholl. If you looked up 'experienced assistant manager' in the dictionary you'd probably find a picture of Nicholl.

Gordon Strachan is also involved in an advisory capacity. One hopes that this will not include giving McPake lessons on dealing with the media.

But there's no getting around it - Dundee drop into the Championship with a rookie manager and at the time of writing just nine players aged over 21. That number includes 39 year old Kenny Miller and 34 year old Andrew Davies (who has been injured since he arrived in January and who eschewed the chance to play in this division for Ross County) as well as club player of the year Nathan Ralph who is set to exploit a relegation clause in his contract to return to England.

So McPake has some recruiting to do, and quickly. And there's no question that he is at high risk of experiencing the same problems that Dundee United, Inverness and Partick Thistle did in recent years following relegation: a huge squad turnover (with, in the case of the former two, a new boss as well) and a dicey start as an essentially new team takes time to gel and which is exacerbated by the pressure of poor early results. That is presumably one of the areas where Dundee hope Strachan can provide significant aid.

The flip side is that he will not be left short on the budget front. Since Nelms and Tim Keyes, with their consortium FPS, took over the club in 2013 they have been generous financially - for the first five seasons losses have totalled £2.3m despite the sale of players like Kane Hemmings, Greg Stewart and Jack Hendry for decent fees. Expect a further financial hit following this nightmare season, and another for the upcoming Championship campaign with the massive costcutting and reduced income that it entails.

They've also been remarkably patient despite a constant failure by Paul Hartley, Neil McCann and finally McIntyre to meet the targets (usually a top six finish) that have been set and budgeted for. Luckily for the fans these are not egotistic, unscrupulous owners who interfere above their station and are looking to make a quick buck. They simply appear to be honking at appointing managers.

Maybe they've struck it lucky this time with McPake. And optimistic supporters can point to the success of Ross County's homegrown duo of Steven Ferguson and Stuart Kettlewell as a sign that appointing from within can work. But they got to work with the bulk of the squad that went down, and competed with a Dundee United side that took six months to sort themselves out. McPake faces a far harder task this coming season. Will he be up to it?


Lawrie Spence has whinged about Scottish football on Narey's Toepoker since September 2007.  He has a life outside this blog.  Honestly.