biffer

This is hideous.

St Johnstone draw in Istanbul v Galatasaray. If it was Rangers or Celtis it'd be hailed as a magnificent result, quality performance yaydayqda Actually even a top English side would say ti was decent. All well get is brave, unexpected etc.

From everything I’ve read, the concern isn’t the number of people at events, it’s the public transport, choke points like toilets and catering, etc.

I'm going to the cricket in Nottingham tomorrow. 20,000 people (full capacity), no distancing, bars and food stalls all open.

Probably got COPD from smoking.

Yeah, I put Eurosport on at that point. No commentary, just the race. Fantastic race, brilliant win by Carapaz.

Tao Geoghan Hart going in the Cycling Road Race tonight. Scotland’s most successful ever road racer. Also Scots in rowing heats as part of the Men’s four, Women’s four and Women’s pair. Seoniad McIntosh is a medal prospect in the 10m air rifle Lucy Hope as part of the 4x100m freestyle team. The Murray brothers are both playing their opening doubles matches The women’s football team has its second game, likely to feature both Caroline Weir and Kim Little.

When the French said you'd need to be vaccinated to go into a coffee shop, nearly a million people registered for a vaccination the next day. Do that with pubs here and you'd have a similar effect

On the flip side, fair play to Gary Neville for slagging off Boris Johnson et al on Sky News this morning.

Took one of my mates to task for this. Pointed out it’s generally people who have a passing interest, or are casual fans, or swept up in the national fervour who say we should be supporting them. If you speak to football fans down south, guys who go regularly to games, travel to away matches, have season tickets, they wouldn’t expect us to support them. Because they understand that sport, but particularly football, is built on rivalry and competition. If it wasn’t for that deeply embedded rivalry, football wouldn’t generate the atmosphere it does, the passion at a national level wouldn’t be there - and ironically those people who tell us we should be supporting them wouldn’t be interested because it wouldn’t be such a huge thing. When you’re invested in supporting a team, you can’t just put a rivalry aside for a few hours. That doesn’t make people who are invested better supporters or anything like that, but unless you’ve been involved like that, I don’t think you truly understand why people can’t just put it aside.

Just in case anyone hasn’t noticed, tonight at 1930 in a piece of masterful scheduling Channel 4 is showing Scotland’s Coastal Railways with Julie Walters. Seems like can’t miss TV to me.

That’s not quite as definitive a statement as the one you made.

Don’t forget about Valneva as well, which is a traditional deactivated virus vaccine.

Some chatter that they’re having a bit of trouble in scaling up production. Which might be why they’ve not applied for a license yet. They’ll get there eventually though.

Can you point me to that research? Not seen that.

The Boötes void, sometimes called the Great Void, is a huge, spherical region of space that contains very few galaxies. It's approximately 700 million light years from Earth and located near the constellation Boötes, which is how it got its name. The supervoid measures 250 million light-years in diameter, representing approximately 0.27% of the diameter of the observable universe, making it the largest known void in the Universe. At first, astronomers were only able to find eight galaxies across the expanse, but further observations revealed a total of 60 galaxies. Now, while that might still seem like a lot, it would be like stumbling upon ONLY 60 objects across a region larger than the continental United States (and that's just in two dimensions). According to astronomer Greg Aldering, the scale of the void is such that, "If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s." Looking at the volume of the Boötes void, it should contain about 10,000 galaxies, when considering that the average distance between galaxies elsewhere in the universe is a few million light-years. But the question is....why and how this void came to be. There hasn't been enough time since the universe began for mere gravitational forces to clear out a space of that size. There's a theory which suggests that supervoids are caused by the intermingling of smaller mini voids, like soapbubbles coming together. But a more...maybe creepier...explanation is that the Boötes void could be the result of an expanding Kardashev III scale civilization. As the colonization bubble expands outward from its home system, the civilization dims each star (and subsequently each galaxy) it encounters by blanketing it in a Dyson shell. This might also explain why the void has such a nice, spherical shape. Oh and we're seeing a snapshot of The Void 700million years ago due to the limit of speed of light. A lot could have happened in 700 million years. Sleep well.

I forgot to add that our experience for this game was added to by the two lads in the pub singing various Scotland songs, including ‘we have a dream’. Unfortunately they were too young to remember it and were singing the ABBA one instead.

The glaring problem is scoring goals. We had 42 shots on goal in three games and only scored once. Not many teams have had, or will have, that many in the pool games (currently only Italy, Denmark, Netherlands and Switzerland have more). So we’re doing a lot of things right. Many of us sat through years when we were lucky to get one or two chances in a game. One other difference from the past for me is that this is a fairly young side. There aren’t many who will be gone in the next four year period. That’s not usually the case for us. There’s a core of good players playing at a decent level in Robertson, Tierney, McGinn, MacTominay, Gilmour, that will all likely still be going for the next four years, so I’m hopeful. We have a shot at World Cup qualification, but I hope folk remember that we scraped into the best 24 teams in Europe through a back door, so not getting into the best 13 to qualify for the World Cup isn’t a total disaster.

Ok. I believe we had more than 40 shots at goal over three games and scored once. It’s pretty obvious what the problem is. There’s a big but here though. For most of my lifetime watching Scotland at tournaments, we’ve been thinking about who was retiring and how we’d replace them at the end of the tournament. Most of this team is here for at least 6 more years. If we find a reasonable goalscorer then we’ll be really fucking dangerous. Doesn’t need to be world class, not a two goals from three chances like Modric, just take one out of six. Even one out of eight we would have scored five goals in those three games. I genuinely think we’re better place now than we have been since the mid eighties.

This isn’t a dig at you, but it always annoys me when people give half marks out of ten.

Terrific result. Adams was great, worked hard. But Billy Gilmour, wow. 20 years old, wanders on for his first real start for Scotland in an international tournament against England at Wembley and cruises it. Best midfielder on the pitch. Delighted with the result and the performance. And after watching the Czech v Croat game, we can win on Tuesday.

Yesterday for me was a demonstration of how a few inches and a bit of luck makes a result. The second goal for me is one of those unique events that you can't really damn anyone for - the odds of that ball rebounding into exactly the right spot for the guy to then hit it so sweetly are pretty long. Give it to him another nine times and I doubt he'd hit the target twice. The deflection that would've been an own goal, the shot off the bar, various other bits and pieces all just not going the right way. Yes, I know you make your own luck (or rather make yourself not rely on it either way) but I'm not overly critical. There were a couple of guys who were a bit deer in the headlights at the start, but my main criticism is actually for the first goal - defender over ran the cross ball and ended up underneath it, letting the striker in for the header. Oh, and Lyndon Dykes is a big haddy.

thplinth and his self obsessed rambling are reminding me why I spend far less time on here nowadays. Tedious arrogant self satisfied nonsense from him. I’ll maybe see you all again in a few months.

No need to apologise, his ‘I don’t rise to it’ post followed by two pages of him rising to it is comedy gold. Well done to my Saintees, two cups in a season after one in 136 years would be amazing.