capt_oats

This is fundamentally where I am. As I've said before, I've no strong opinion on Alexander. I think he's a decent enough manager for this level and his record over the calendar year for 2021 (especially given the circumstances) is over far too long a period to just dismiss it as luck or a "fluke". Also the turnaround in goalscoring of Cole and Watt along with Lamie becoming a serviceable centre back suggests he has something as a coach. However, it's a perfectly legitimate question to ask what the f**k has happened since January with changes in shape, players being disappeared from the team, a relatively efficient team suddenly not converting chances despite having more attempts on goal and us now seemingly unable to keep a clean sheet against any opposition. You can put a certain amount of it down to Watt leaving as he was a "difference maker" in the same way Boyle was for Hibs. The fact that we're drawing games we were previously winning leans into that idea and the fact that we apparently thought we could get by until summer with what we had feels like a massive misjudgement (in the same way we misjudged the LC group albeit still finished top of the group in the end). One other thing I did wonder is it's simply the case that he's not a particularly adaptable manager. A big part of managing in Scotland compared to the level he's learned his trade in England is that the opposition work you out quicker and you generally have to be able to adapt quickly. You don't get the luxury of having only 2 games against each side. Much like his pal at St Johnstone Alexander just seems to be plodding along doing the same thing.

I'd imagine that's the driving factor behind the change in strategy. The way we were operating with Robinson was unsustainable. It feels like it's stating the obvious but if you're looking at needing to sign fewer players then you can actually spend more time working on those deals. Although that didn't exactly work out in the end for McCall in 14/15. If you're having year on year rebuilds then it's an unfortunate fact that some of those players are simply going to be squad filler. This season for example, it's almost certain that we signed a handful of players simply to allow us to get through the Betfreds as up to that point we were running with actual school weans on the bench. In terms of numbers these are what we've signed each summer window (or close to it in Samson, Lucas, Mugabi and Chapman's case) over the past 10 years: 21/22 (Alexander) - 12 (Shields, Amaluzor, Woolery, Van Veen, Kelly, O'Connor, Parker, Slattery, Ojala, Goss, Johansen, Roberts (loan)) 20/21 (Robinson) - 11 (Lamie, White, McGinley, Fox, O'Hara, O'Donnell, Cole, Chapman, Hastie (loan), Lang (loan) Crawford (loan)) 19/20 (Robinson) - 13 (Gallagher, Polworth, Carroll, Sloth, Hylton, Long, Seedorf, Ilic, Manzinga, MacIver, Cole (loan), O'Hara (loan) Mugabi) 18/19 (Robinson) - 8 (Gillespie, Donnelly, Johnson, Taylor-Sinclair, Gorrin, Mbulu, Sammon (loan), Aldred (loan)) 17/18 (Robinson) - 14 (Fisher, Bigirimana, Tanner, Carson, Rose, Griffiths, Dunne, Kipré, Newell, Plummer, Ferguson, Petravicius, Grimshaw, Hartley (loan)) 16/17 (McGhee) - 9 (Heneghan, Tait, Blyth, Brill, McHugh, Clay, Bowman, Belic (loan), Lucas) 15/16 (Baraclough) - 11 (Chalmers, Clarkson, Fletcher, Laing, Moult, Kennedy, Robinson, Ripley (loan), Taylor (loan), Grimshaw (loan) Samson) 14/15 (McCall) - 5 (Law, Twardzik, Ainsworth, Ojamma, (loan), O'Brien (loan)) 13/14 (McCall) - 8 (Lawson, Vigurs, Sutton, Kerr, Nielsen, McManus, Anier (loan), Ainsworth (loan)) 12/13 (McCall) - 2 (Ramsden, Kerr (loan) 11/12 (McCall) - 9 (Devlin, Higdon, Law, Cummins, Hetherington, Francis-Angol, Mekongo, Clancy, Daley)

Fwiw, here's the squad in order of minutes played this season.

Aye, that's the way I see it. If we're bringing in 5 to go into the starting XI and it means say, McGinley, Goss and Efford are being bumped down to the bench then fine. That's kind of how I imagined it going forward when Burrows was making his sales pitch for the thinking behind the change in strategy when he did the interview on the MFC Podcast last summer.

Going back to the quotes from Daws in the article @Casagolda posted the other week it raises the question about potential changes and how many. IIRC the reports from the folk who were at the AGM in February were that we were looking at 5 max. An admission there that some things worked, some didn't. It'd be interesting to know whether that's referring to us missing out on players or players we signed that haven't quite worked out. Covering old ground but the OOC players are: Morrison, Lamie, O'Connor, Grimshaw, Nirennold, O'Hara, Shaw (loan ends), Donnelly, Amaluzor, Roberts. Players with a year left: Fox, SOD, Carroll, Ojala, Cornelius, Goss, KVV, Efford, Mahon There's enough scope there (IMO) to allow for some meaningful movement without it necessarily being a full blown overhaul and rebuild. After that it's a question of who or what type of players we're targeting.

Never miss an opportunity to post this image...

Less about the Goss interview (I haven't seen it and I don't know what players are like personality wise in the dressing room) but something that crossed my mind when I saw the team for the Rangers games was that there just seemed to be a lack of 'experience' and there just seem to be a collection of fairly vanilla characters about the squad. There was no one in that team line that gave me the impression that they'd be willing/capable of taking the game by the scruff of the neck in the event that, say, Rangers went down to 10 men after 28 minutes. It was never an argument for keeping them but it definitely feels like we've never really replaced the intangible aspects we got from folk like Hartley and Tait.

I think I'm more inclined to give a bit of leeway on the recruitment than others, largely because I've always felt that signings like Amaluzor, Nirrenold etc were only ever intended to be short term placeholders because it's wildly unrealistic to expect us to turn over an entire squad or get an entire squad recruited in one window and that's fine they're on short term deals. No harm, no foul - I had zero expectations of Amaluzor, Nirennold or Mich'el Parker. For me, we've prioritised certain players and got them in with others filling in the gaps to a greater or lesser extent around the squad. I'd hope/expect us to be looking at addressing those gaps this summer. It feels to me like we've taken a phased approach to recruitment which I get. IMO the ones that we should probably be judging in terms of the new strategy are the long term ones; Kelly, Johansen, Slattery, Woolery, Shields and Tierney who were all signed on 3 year deals. Kelly - fine Johansen - started off well but as has been pointed out his season started last May so he's now been playing almost a full calendar year (albeit he's missed the last couple of games) so perhaps him hitting a wall after January shouldn't have come as a surprise. Slattery - fine, the pages upon pages that have been written about his absence at least suggest he's worth having around. Woolery - fine, again having been bombed out the starting XI probably hasn't helped him. Shields - hmmmmmmmmmmm...being kind it's probably worth factoring in it's his first season playing at this level Tierney - fine, love the wee man The concern I have going forward is that our 2021 form was largely off the back of Alexander having worked some sort of witchcraft to turn non-prolific strikers into goalscorers and also being largely solid at the back and being able to shut games down. The fact he turned Devante Cole into a 1 in 2 striker then repeated that with Tony Watt deserves credit but the output from strikers seems to have gone off a cliff since Watt fucked off. We don't seem to be anywhere near as efficient in front of goal as we were.

Not disagreeing with the sentiment of the post but on this specific point, it's really just a quirk of the league format we have and often it just creates a false narrative. If we didn't have the split we'd have a completely different set of fixtures. If we hadn't finished Top 6 people would be (rightly) losing their minds given our position on Boxing Day but, again, we'd have a completely different set of fixtures. Rather than papering over anything the fact we've landed in the Top 6 (deservedly so IMO given our form in the first half of the season) is actually amplifying our issues. We've been given a set of fixtures that we were less likely to win (especially given our away form). Fact is that even in our slump in the R3 fixtures we took points off the majority of the teams currently making up the bottom half (I've added in R1 & R2 form as well): 1st: Celtic - Loss (0-4) | (LL (0 pts)) = 0 total 2nd: Rangers - Draw (2-2) | (XL (1 pt)) = 2 total 3rd: Hearts - Loss (2-0) | (LW (3 pts)) = 3 total 4th: Dundee United - Loss (2-0) | (LW (3 pts)) = 3 total 5th: Ross County - Loss (0-1) | (WL (3 pts)) = 3 total 6th: Motherwell -------------------- 7th: Livi - Draw (2-2) | (WW (6 pts)) = 7 total 8th: Hibs - Draw (0-0) (1-2 loss in the Cup) | (LX (1 pt)) = 2 total 9th: Aberdeen - Draw (1-1) (2-1 win in the Cup) | (WW (6 pts)) = 7 total 10th: St Mirren - Win (4-2) | (XX (2 pts)) = 5 total 11th: St Johnstone - Loss (2-1) | (XW (4 pts)) = 4 total 12th: Dundee - Draw (1-1) | (WL (3 pts)) = 4 total So in the last round of fixtures we took 7 points from the bottom 6 teams compared with only 1 point from the teams in the Top 6. Top 6 sides accounted for 11 of our 40 pts at the split, bottom 6 sides 29 pts. For all our faults there nothing to suggest that we wouldn't have picked up points if we were playing say, Livi or St Mirren in our post-split fixtures rather than Rangers and United given Alexander's actually unbeaten against the two former.

I mean, I've not seen the interview but after a 1-0 loss where we had *chances* I'm not surprised he's talking things up. In fairness I don't think there's been much issue with the recruitment. We've a pretty stable squad on longer term deals than usual, there's enough there for someone to work with if given a window themselves (IMO). For all I (and others) have talked about Alexander hitting his KPIs (he has, unequivocally) there's surely a flip to that where even the manager would agree that 1 win in however many puts him in a difficult position. @eliphas' post above hints at what I suspected might be the case, it seems unlikely that we'd leave ourselves on the hook for that sort of commitment. For all Neville walked back on his comments after he sacked Alexander there's a sound enough logic in their reasoning. A quick reminder this is what he said at the time: I think there's probably a solid argument for him...."moving on" from our POV...and his tbf. As folk have said, it's difficult to come back with any sort of credit from 1 win in 14 or whatever it is but @Kapowzer touched on it in a post earlier, the best hope for him and us is that some lower league jobber in England needs a new manager and with the lower leagues finishing up today I'd imagine there will be a few jobs opening up. On top of his CV to date a Top 6 finish in his first full season is a sellable point and although this run is poor if you're choosing to spin it you can point to losing our top scorer in January and also highlight that we've not been losing games (today is only our 2nd b2b defeat since October) and the other thing is that we've not been taking pumpings. The "fine margins" crew are right. We've generally tended to change manager when we've been in a relegation scrap however in this circumstance I wouldn't be surprised if an alternate looked at our squad and situation and felt there was plenty here that a fresh pair of eyes and some new ideas could work with.

Highs: hilariously coming back from 1-0 down at Ibrox hilariously coming back from 2-0 down at Ibrox scudding Aberdeen 2-0 with not only our only 2 shots on target but our only 2 shots on goal - 100% accuracy the actual tears of some Aberdeen podcast boy talking about Kevin Van Veen Kevin Van Veen bodying Declan Gallagher all over Fir Park with one functioning arm finishing top 6 despite only winning 1 league game in 2022 Ricki Lamie's injury time equaliser to get it right up David Martindale Lows: getting scudded by Airdrie losing twice to Dundee having not lost to them since 2017 or whatever Bobby Madden and his penalty retake nonsense against St Mirren only winning 1 league game in 2022 Callum Hendry channeling his inner van Basten in injury time at McDairmid Park losing to a 10 man Rangers having rescheduled the fucking game to suit their schedule

I noticed that Burrows had replied to one of his reply guys that the ST launch would be soon and that they were working on a few "technical" points. Given it's fair to say STs are likely to be a tough sell this summer I wondered if there was a chance of us looking at making some signings that might shift some STs, we've never really been a "marquee signing" sort of club but other than Louis Moult rocking back up on a promise that he'd come round to every ST holder for tea who'd actually (realistically) get people back on board. (Mikey Devlin probably isn't one. No offence to Mikey) I'm absolutely up for ushering in a Showtime era of ML1 Galacticos btw.

Aye, I mean you look at Charlie Dunne and he seems to have been largely injury free at St Mirren this season but in Devlin's case IIRC he was actually injured when he signed for Aberdeen from Accies and has pretty much been a sicknote since. I think you can maybe get away with taking a chance on someone off the back of one long term injury but when you've got someone who's not kicked a baw in 2 years and wasn't exactly injury free before that it's a tough sell.

Hard no. He's not kicked a ball since he got 10 minutes for Aberdeen against St Mirren on 5th December 2020. 19/20 was the last time he had a season where he played even semi-regularly. Given Alexander made a thing of wanting players he could rely on to be fit over a season Devlin's pretty much the opposite of that. This was his 20/21 season...

On the European stuff, I'd rather we were playing in Europe than not. Not least because assuming we've qualified via the league it predicates a good league position prior. That said @Swello's post on the previous page largely sums up where I am in terms of being enthusiastic about "competing" in Europe. Fact is that the tournaments have been carved up and diluted to the point that it is what it is; generally we'll perform to our seeding and that'll be that. It's a very different landscape now compared to how it was as someone in their early teens with games and the novelty of fixtures against Katowice and Dortmund. I'm also one of those arseholes with the view that the qualifiers aren't the tournament proper. So aye, qualifying for Europe is definitely something we should be targeting and aspiring towards but there's a certain reality about what happens when we actually get there.

Little bit of column A, little bit of column B....and so on. Tbf, I don't think the Hapoel and Stjarnan results are comparable at all. MyPa 47 and Stjarnan? Absolutely.

There's definitely that.

Still gutted there was no backflip. Also shoutout to the SPFL admin for making sure there's Motherwell #content on the TL.

I know the question is to @thisGRAEME (that he's answered) but to chip in because I also have thoughts... For me Kelly's below peak 17/18 Carson but probably ahead of the pre-DVT 18/19 version as there was a strong argument that Gillespie should have been getting a shot at the gloves anyway regardless of the unfortunate DVT stuff and also the post-DVT/pre-injury version we saw at the start of last season. So it's really depends on what window of Carson's Motherwell career you're talking about. I wouldn't say it was a bad move to push the boat out for Kelly. I don't buy the reply guy shouts that had it not been for Kelly we'd be in a relegation battle but the fact that we're Top 6 and have had a fit goalkeeper the entire season pushes it into the "good move" bracket. You saw what happened in the Samson season and also when we tried to make Twardzik #1 (LOL, we actually fucking did that). It doesn't end well so if we're pushing out boats I'd rather we did it to get a good goalkeeper than not. For me, he showed his value last season in direct comparison to the rotating cast of 'keepers we had be it Carson, Chapman (lol) or Archer but I don't think we'll cash in on him or anything and despite appreciating how the club operate in platforming certain players for profile I don't think the overselling him does him any favours. As I said, Lewis Irons wanging on about "world class" saves on the commentary is just reaching a bit. A tough listen in anyone's language.

A good goalkeeper and possibly better suited to being captain than SOD but he's not the player the media team want to Jedi mind trick folk into thinking he is. Lads, Lewis Irons can squeal about "world class" saves all he wants, it doesn't make it so (it's also very annoying to listen to). Going by his TL I definitely wouldn't be going for a pint with him. He has a nice dug though.

I'd already chucked my vote in for Kelly before the Vote Nirrenold lobby started. I mean, at the time of writing he's played every game and due to the way the squad has been managed he's the only player who actually has a full season as a body of work. Had Slattery not dropped out the side he'd have been a decent shout, had KVV not been as patchy I'd happily have voted for him. Bevis is probably the only other candidate and even then he's had a pretty up and down season.

I find the jester strip a weird one, like @crazylegsjoe_mfc it definitely has a nostalgia value. It was at the era before 'modern fitba' and you actually had a strip for more than one season. The other thing is that I think it's actually fine as a standalone top, maybe not a Motherwell strip, but as a jersey it's alright. For me it's really only when you pair it with the shorts for that harlequin effect that it looks a bit daft. Edit: Swear down I hadn't seen @Desp's post when I wrote that Also...Tommy Coyne (m'lord).

I mean, it's eBay but....oooooft! That £199 away shirt is listed on Depop as well...