David

There is no blanket contract for the Europa League - the channels are free to pick and choose until the group stages (ITV4 tend to hoover those up). STV takes part in any ITV Europa and Champions League rights - it's about the only football they pay for. I honestly can't see anyone picking up a Saints game unless we get a genuinely big name. STV doesn't have the cash, BBC needs it for other things and the likes of Five wouldn't be able to justify it. They only take an interest in the likes of Hearts when they draw a Spurs or Liverpool. The only potential saviour is BT or Sky if they need to fill a spare evening. And you're right about S2 showing the Monaco home game, but even that was only down to German TV picking up the rights (for a small fortune) and showing the game at teatime - which probably hurt the attendance. STV got the domestic rights for peanuts.

It's basically a set of relational tables in MySQL 5 but to be honest I did it in a bit of a hurry and it's not the best way to do things if I'm honest - it originated from Access originally. The one thing I should say is that it's best to stick with MySQL and PHP for this if you can; the official site runs on that - and is likely to stay that way for quite a while. There is a front-end (built in Coldfusion / Java) which I'll restore to life somewhere over the weekend. Short on time today but I'll try and get the data exported in whatever format you like - happy to dump the SQL create/insert scripts or CSV or both - whatever suits you really. The idea wasn't to create something separate, it was more to make the data, its relationships and joins in a useful way so anyone could basically run with it afterwards - but the crucial thing for us was accuracy. Brian checked pretty much every player record back to about 1975 to make sure the data held up to scrutiny.

Should just add - I'm happy to dig out the data if anyone wants to work away and improve it? The work got done in 2006-07 and then kept up to date for a season, but it's far from perfect in terms of structure, being easy to query, etc. Get in touch via PM or something and I'll sort it out if you want a go at it. Anything to help the club and get the data into a useful format...

From a huge amount of work down the years by Jim Slater and Brian Doyle, this was already done up to 2008 and exists in MySQL format. I built a site (currently mothballed until the data's been brought up to date) but the plan is still to hand this piece of work once it's completed up to 2010/2011 and double-checked, over to the club for inclusion in the official site. Watch this space...

Not been on the forum for 6 months or more, and the same topics keep coming back round again - if it's not "how can't we see Saints games on the net" it's "why are we so bad at PR" or something else. Do you honestly think Saints would get 1000 people paying to watch some daft online channel? Hogwash.

They're not in the SPL for a start.

You caught it during some pesky site maintenance - back to normal now at the original address.

If there's nothing that will (a) get him in trouble, or ( give away tactical secrets that would beat us, would you be willing to scan a copy of those? Suspect a lot of people would be interested to see them.

He won't be the first Scotland manager to do that, nor the last.

Reason I looked on the door (in passing on the way home) was that I used to go to college with a previous owner, Duncan Campbell - any Aberfeldy Saints know what became of him? Off topic so PM me if you like.

Was in Aberfeldy yesterday, and noticed a sign on the Fountain Bar - "security provided by Gavin Price". He was a local boy from Breadalbane so I'm assuming it's our former star striker.

Working for STV I'm supposed to say it's brilliant and all that, but for the first few weeks I thought it started really slowly. And I hate the Scottish narrator. However it's grown on me as things moved along, quite enjoying it now. Just felt bizarre that our promotions beforehand, were based around a character that got shot dead in the 2nd episode! Shameless plug - http://player.stv.tv/programmes/underbelly/

People who were on past forums and the old Mailing List will no doubt expect me to chip in with my old fellow supporter's classics: "Come on Saints, compensate for the wind!" "Come on you, stop paintin' yer toenails!" "McDiarmid is one of the rouder pitches in Scottish football, eh?" "Come on Biscuits, pass it tae Preston" "Get up ye poof it's a man's game!"

The Simpsons names just keep coming - the players referred to Graeme Jones as "Ned Flanders"...

Doubt it to be honest - there's still 7 rounds of games left and I can't see them getting 20-ish points ahead by the time they play us - although if those damn referees keep going against Celtic, you never know :-)