Before we play Cumbernauld Colts in our first league game of the season we are looking at Rory McEwan (Now renamed in game to MacEwan to match what is on the interwebs).
He comes in from Stirling Uni as our 3rd best player (By star rating) and at 21 has room to improve. Very solid mentals for a player of his age with good decisions, plus with 14 Acceleration and player traits of running through the centre and knocking ball past opponents I hope he & Kieran Balfour can be very effective attacking influences from Centre Mid this season.
As we have passed into August we have so month-end and new season stats to have a look at. As we’ve not played any competitive games there are no games stats to look at but I have done an attribute comparison position-by-position for the best player in that position (Regardless of whether they are natural or not) just to get a feel of how much we have pro-or-regressed.
The loss of Kev Waugh (Played 1 game for Hibs so far, a friendly v Crusaders (1-1) where he got a 7.4), Josh Donaldson (1 game for Dundee Utd U18 v Alloa U18 (1-1), 6.8) and Chris Barras (One 24-minute Sub appearance in the Championship for Dunfermline, moved from Berwick for £850, rising to £1.4k) shows how the top end performers we have in each position now generally are a far bit worse, with Mark Burbidge being the exception to this on the wing. I do feel that are squad depth is so much better – we only really had 2 central defenders of note last year, now we have 4, so I hope to perform as well as last year, though time will tell.
Of current players we have 2 with an attribute that has increased by 2 points since 1st September 2018 (Kieran Balfour Off The Ball 6 to 8, Neil McVitie Work Rate 11 to 13), 51 attributes that have increaserd by 1 point across 7 players and 11 attributes that have fallen by 1 point across 7 players also. As the new crop bed in we will start looking at their attribute increases/decreases as well as their game stats.
The simple code I have used for getting this data out of my db is below:
SELECT
p.player_nm,
p.player_unique_ID,
p.game_dt,
a.[Attribute],
a.[Attribute_Score]
INTO #ATTRIB
FROM [dbo].[squad_player_t] p
INNER JOIN [dbo].[squad_player_attributes_unpivot_t] a
ON p.batch_id = a.batch_id
AND p.player_unique_ID = a.player_unique_ID
SELECT * INTO #ATTRIBMONTH from #Attrib
PIVOT (AVG (Attribute_Score) for game_dt in
([2018-07-01],[2018-08-01],[2018-09-01],[2018-10-01],[2018-11-01],[2018-12-01],[2019-01-01],[2019-02-01],[2019-03-01],[2019-04-01],[2019-05-01],[2019-05-19],[2019-07-01],[2019-08-01])) as AttributeScore
SELECT player_nm, Attribute, [2018-09-01], [2019-08-01], [2019-08-01] – [2018-09-01] As change
FROM #ATTRIBMONTH WHERE [2019-08-01] IS NOT NULL AND [2018-09-01] IS NOT NULL AND [2019-08-01] != [2018-09-01] order by change DESC, player_nm, attribute
Before the game v Cumbernauld I had this news item through:
God bless those extra 3 people 🙂 🙂 🙂
We drew both our games v Cumbernauld last season and they finished in 5th. The season profile has us finishing in 3rd and them in 7th but I expect a tough game yet again. We go with the Positive Gegenpress after our 7 goals in 2 games v in-theory higher quality opponents.
I start with Lumsden up top, Glasgow & Burbidge the wingers and Cairney pulling the strings as the number 10. Balfour & Clappers are in the centre of Midfield though MacEwan will be pushing Balfour (Changed to Mezzala on Support) and McVitie (When he is back from suspension) will be the BWM. Coll and Gibb are the wingbacks, Niang & Hunter centre-backs with Burnett, who has done well in pre-season in goal. Cumbernauld are in a 4-4-1-1 formation. Lets give this a go.
HT Cumbernauld Colts 0 Civil Service 1 (Clapperton 23)
A beautiful start, with Burbidge rattling the upright and pretty constant pressure, though Cumbernauld looked dangerous when they had the ball. The breakthrough came in the 23rd minute, a beautiful tackle from Clappers in his own half led to a break, which Clappers himself finished low in the bottom left corner. 1-0. We continued to look dangerous going forward and the half finished 1-0 – solid first half all round.
FT Cumbernauld Colts 0 Civil Service 3 (Clapperton 23, Glasgow 50 Scott Mackay 90+2 ) Att 226 (1 Away)
Carrying on from where they left off, Jamie Glasgow scored in the 50th minute, with a shot that looked like it took a small deflection to make it 2-0. Our fitness really looked like it was overwhelming Cumbernauld. At 60 mins we went 3-5-2, Murdoch on for Burbidge, Scott Mackay for Cairney. The last 30 looked pretty solid, and we rounded off a great day at the office when Scott Mackay finished off his own woodwork-rebound after some great work by James Hainey. 3-0 it finished, and I feel we have really moved on as an overall unit. A mention is dispatches for Fraser Burnett in goal – He held 2 and parried 1 of the shots he faced and looked solid throughout. MotM Scott Clapperton 🙂
Next time (In 10 game-days) we have our first outing in the IRN-BRU Cup 1st Round against League 1 Clyde, who haven’t had an amazing early season but did beat Stranraer in the only league game so far. They do have another 2 games before we play them so we can hope they will play a rotated squad and we can do to them what we did to Barrow & Peterhead in the friendlies. See you then.