Originally Posted by
DollyLongstaffe
There was a time a few years back where you maybe thought this forum could be a representative sample of the attitudes of fans. Now I doubt it's anything remotely like it.
Oddly enough the thing that used to pi$$ me off most in the old days were the "positive thinkers". Not because they looked on the bright side - that's just a question of temperament - but because they so often seemed to feel irrationally threatened by people they thought were being "negative". The theory seemed to be that if everyone (management, players, fans) stayed "positive" this would be translate into better results on the park; therefore anyone who broke ranks was a traitor to the cause. As though someone having a go at Darren Mackie or Jimmy Calderwood on here on a Thursday it would reduce our chances of a result against Motherwell on the Saturday. I thought this was superstitious hokum at the time, and still do.
But for all that I thought these folk were wrong I thought they were more typical of the average fan's mind-set than I was, and they pretty much dominated the board. I felt part of a minority of realists who were often taken to task for "negativity".
The irony is that now that the board is down to tiny numbers it's dominated by views far more cynical than mine, and that at a time when by any objective measure the club is doing far better than it was a few years back. It's an interesting question why, when a board like this has shrunk to a tiny rump, it's the cynics who've disproportionally chosen to hang around. Not that I have any answers beyond fairly loose speculation.