capt_oats

Aye, he was on the bench but was unused. We didn't have either of O'Hara or Grimshaw available as midfield options at that point though and Slattery hadn't signed. Alexander seems to have been making an argument for using 'the squad' rather than having a set XI week in, week out. With that in mind it wouldn't be shock if we've 'rested' Donnelly. Equally, given the amount of 'knee' we had last season it wouldn't be a surprise if we were conscious of the load put on players coming back from injury or just in general tbh. Then again, if we're keeping +ve cases of the 'rona on the QT to avoid giving a heads up that a player is unavailable for 10 days or whatever then that wouldn't be a surprise either. I notice the 'Team News' tab has been removed from the Squad page on the official as well.

The SSN ticker had SOD as a "doubt" due to "illness" prior to the game. On Donnelly my initial thought was that we were just resting him given the way Alexander had been talking about his injury, the whole "fragmented" pre-season and injury management pre-game: Given Livi's pitch it would have seemed smart not to risk Donnelly because...'knee' anyway. Who knows though, maybe he's got the 'rona as well. The wild thing about SOD having the lurgy is that if he also missed the Dundee game because of it Alexander would have probably avoided a fair bit of grief for fucking about and being perceived to have been resting players if the club had announced that was why he wasn't playing. Fucking weirdos.

Div Turnbull's 1-2 with the bar. Some boi.

To add to that (in comparison to no equalisers until January last season), that's up played 3 league games and we've scored 5 goals. We didn't score our 5th league goal last season until Matchday 8 in the 3-0 against Aberdeen on 20th September. That was with us having only scored in one of our opening 6 league games. Arguably our opening 3 fixtures this season have been tougher than last year. Hibs (h), St Johnstone (a), Livi (a) vs County (a), United (h), Livi (h).

And Tyler Magloire...

It'd put you on around 44 points at the split so based on previous seasons you'd be in the conversation for Top 6. 6th place after 33 games last season was 40 points. 18/19 it was 50 points, 17/18 it was 46.

Just putting some #respect on it. The equaliser came from a short corner lads (and was actually a smashing header from Watt). Advocating subbing on Robbie Crawford is a bold statement.

@Desp running the team now is it?

The option to buy would be a weird one, which isn't to say it doesn't exist, but given what Hull paid for him and he's still got a year on his deal after this it's hard to imagine they'd be fine with just writing him off at say, the sort of money you paid Rangers for Murphy. A good season up here with Hibs and you'd think they either have a player they can bring back into their squad or one that they'd be able to recoup the bulk of that £1m+ they spent.

I'd asked this in our thread off the back of us being linked with a Norwegian defender at the start of the week as we're obviously cutting it fine for paperwork stuff if it has to be concluded before the window shuts given it took just over a fortnight after the fact for us to announce Ojala and we'd also had to go through the appeal process despite him having a substantial number of caps (and having captained the national side) along with playing in the Danish top flight. Alexander seemed to imply in his press conference yesterday that the actual paperwork process can run after the window closes as long as the deal itself is done. But he wasn't exactly convincing on the detail. I suppose United announcing their Finnish player yesterday leans into that idea given they've indicated "The club are now working through the work permit process and hope to have Ilmari available as soon as possible." Presumably the risk there is that the player isn't actually granted a work permit? I posted the link earlier in the thread but Rory Smith had an article in the NY Times this week that focused on us signing Ojala with Burrows detailing the whole process: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/sports/soccer/scotland-football-brexit.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytsports The long and the short of it is here and is basically as @Radford says but the article itself is a much deeper dive: f**k the Tories, f**k Brexit etc.

The caveat with Scott is that he's barely played in a year and a half so there's an obvious question mark there. Similarly he's still only 20 and it's difficult to say how he'll react to his experience at Hull. In a general sense though with us we tried him as a #9 in the post-split games on the 18/19 season when it was clear Main was away and we were to all intents and purposes safe. He found that pretty tough and he wasn't ready to play against Premiership CBs, which was fair enough he was only 18 and as Robinson put it he was still learning how to use his body. I genuinely don't know whether he sees himself as a #9 or a "wide forward". 19/20 season we largely used him off the wings and he fitted in well as an out ball. The dip in form we saw after we sold him should highlight the extent to which we missed him but weirdly I saw a few comments from Motherwell fans last night describing him as an "average" player...fucking idiots. Anyway, generally we'd put him on top of full backs and he had more than enough about him technically to play in that area (unlike Hastie). There's a tactical analysis of the 3-0 game against you lot on the Modern Fitba' site and it highlights Scott specifically. That in effect is a good description of how we used him so the Hibs fans who I saw losing their minds about his lack of goals are kind of missing the point of the role he had in that team. As a package he has all the tools (IMO) and had a very high ceiling (which is presumably why Hull went for him). We got good money for him (£1m+) but as I say the knock on was that our form dipped as a result. In terms of potential he could easily be aiming for a far bigger club than Hibs, whether he realises that is on him really. He's tall, athletic, built and has good feet (and not just as in a "good feet for a big man" cliche), he's legitimately technically very good and has a gallus aspect to his game. The story at the time was that of the 3 who were going out of contract it was Scott and Turnbull who were our priorities to get tied down on long term deals because those were the two we saw as significant saleable assets, Hastie was less of a priority. His time at Hull was fucked. Hull were comfortably mid-table in the Championship when he signed, he picked up a long term injury literally in his first training session, they sold Jarrod Bowen, the 'rona shutdown happened, by the time the re-start happened IIRC some Hull players declined to play because...contracts, they ended up relegated. He scored on his first start for them but he seemed to struggle to get into the team while they were in League 1 and I don't think his career with them has ever really recovered from that. It'll be interesting to see how he gets on as he hasn't played a lot of football and was by no means the finished article when we sold him. It could go either way tbh.

I think his youngest is in the Academy as well.

I don't think anyone necessarily has a problem with Lawless supporting another team. Though I freely admit I don't like the particular team he supports and yes, I absolutely judge him because of it. It's how he chooses to carry himself publicly that causes people to call him out for it.

The thing that I found amusing was that there was a time while he was at Livi where going by his IG he genuinely seemed to be around Fir Park more than he was his own club. I'm the same though there's definitely a bit of disappointment that he never played for us.

There they are...a great bunch of lads.

Get him in the team Grezza.

Aye. I had a swatch at his Twitter when he initially signed on loan from QPR and it was chock full of RTs of Trump. Since disappeared with The Donald being bounced off the platform but aye...I think it's safe to say that the bold Liam and I would not be agreeing on much in terms of a worldview. The stuff that's still there is enough to mark him down as OFTW in my book. Same with Lawleff, I don't follow either on any of their socials because...f**k me, I've no interest in their shite.

On the off chance there's an Venn diagram intersection on here of Aberdeen fans and Twilight Sad fans I'll just leave this here for your consideration. The Hearts x Frightened Rabbit ones were popular IIRC. Than you for your time.

Ultimately the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Even Burrows said, rather matter-of-factly, that we'd see if taking a different approach worked out when he was on the MFC Podcast and Alexander was talking to the press about "learning" about the difficulties of working in the Scottish market. Ultimately you had some fans unhappy with us taking a punt on a grab bag of players in the hope that a few turned good and we'd just quickly write off the others and pretend they hadn't happened with the end result being a frankly obscene turnover of players. Then there were others completely affronted at the sheer number of trialists we had in at the start of this window...how very fucking dare we (the fact we only signed one or two on short term deals pretty much overlooked). Now we're a point where we've brought 9 players in but the last signing was mid-July and there's heavy anxiety that we're not going to sign anyone else ever again. Which tbf is understandable given that on the face of it we look a few first team players short and the "real stuff" kicked off weeks ago. One of my main concerns going into this window was the idea that given both have zero experience recruiting for this league Alexander and Daws might have underestimated the league vs the "quality" they were looking to bring in. So far Kelly is a fine enough signing as long as you swerve his Twitter and accept that while he's got a nice dug he's clearly a fucking idiot, if nothing else Ojala's CV is as solid as we could reasonably expect, Slattery seems fine, on the limited amount we've seen him Van Veen looks better than a Chris Long. Most of those were done reasonably early. What I'd guess the concern would be now is whether the players we bring in before the window closes have actually been worth the trade off of waiting until the end of August to bring them in (whoever they end up being). I guess that's entirely subjective and different people will have different expectations on that front. If you believe Steelmen (I know, right?) we had a midfielder in as a trialist the other day and Burrows has said to his reply guys that we'll be making signings. So that's something. Edit: Hmmmm..... I look forward to people reading that as he's not sure if we'll sign anyone.

I'd imagine that's true and would be true of any other window regardless of "strategy". What feels a bit more high risk is in a circumstance like Gotts, to use him as an example (i've no idea if there's anything in the link with him but it's a good illustration of a point). That seems to be what we're leaning into more with the whole slowly, slowly catchy monkey approach. If we're sitting tight waiting on players/clubs to make decisions, as seems to be the case with Gotts...Leeds by all accounts want shot of him one way or another and if reports are to be believed he has clubs interested in him then you're hoping that we have other options in play if it goes sideways and he ends up choosing say, Salford rather than us. It doesn't really fly to just go "ach well, we've waited a month for a player that we've targeted but he's fucked off to join Gary Neville's side...we'll just run with what we have". Not specific to Motherwell but it definitely feels like the entire market below a certain level is a collection of clubs just looking at each other waiting on other clubs to do something.

Posted this in our thread as it's largely an interview with Burrows but I'd imagine it covers the background for the delay with your Finnish boy as well.

I think this is a problem that a lot of teams are having (not midfielders but transfers in general) for whatever reason Tory Brexit, Pandemic whatever, it seems like the market is slow at the moment and we're in a position where there's only so much that the club can do and it's kind of out their hands when transfers complete. It seems improbable to me that we've not been trying to bring midfielders in but what do I know? I've no idea who we're in for or who we're not but to take Robbie Gotts as an example, who we have been linked with, the first mention from Nixon was 8th August, the good brother @Casagolda had mentioned it was a name that had been floating around back on August 2nd. We're at the 19th August now and he's still at Leeds and while it seems clear they want to move him on there doesn't seem to be an out for him that suits so he's just stuck in a kind of limbo. You saw the Ben Woodburn thing with Hearts where they seemed to have something in place but now Klopp's put a pause on it. Don't know if anyone's a regular reader of the New York Times but there's some chat from Burrows in this article. f**k the Tories, f**k Brexit etc.

More dull patter from me. Given Mr Burrows was on the MFC Podcast saying that the plan for recruitment was going to be a bit different this window compared to what we'd been used to when Robinson was here I was vaguely interested to get an idea of just how different it's been. Like, it's something we were made aware of in advance and no judgement on whether the signings have actually been good or not but it definitely feels like it's put us in a tougher situation on the park at this stage of the season. As it stands we've brought 9 players in...do we really count Parker? Being generous...let's. 9 it is. 3 players signed were still contracted to other clubs (Ojala, Slattery, Kelly), 1 pre-contract (Shields) and 5 free agents (2 who had been at the club on extended trial Parker and Amaluzor and 1 who's worked with Alexander and Daws before; Van Veen). Compared to the 19/20 rebuild (rather than last season's Covid impacted window) that saw 6 pre-contracts (Gallagher, Polworth, Carroll, Sloth, Hylton, Long), 4 free agents (Seedorf, Ilic, Manzinga, MacIver) and 2 loans (Cole, O'Hara) plus 1 free agency signing outside the window (Mugabi). So 13 in total. As it stands it feels like we're maybe 3 or 4 bodies short ond there are a couple who could do with loans out with a week and a bit of the window to go? 19/20 our first 'competitive' game was 13th July. By that point we'd signed 9 players and had 11 in total by the opening league fixture on 3rd August. That was with a squad of 12 already signed. 21/22 our first 'competitive' game was 14th July. By then we'd signed 6 players and 9 by the opening league fixture on 1st August. That was with 13 first team already signed up (plus Morrison, Johnston, Devine and Cornelius). FWIW: Going by Narey's Toepoker's transfer list our 9 bodies in compares with other Premiership clubs like this: Aberdeen: 7 Celtic: 8 Dundee: 6 Dundee United: 3 Hearts: 4 Hibs: 3 Livingston: 13 Rangers: 3 Ross County: 10 St Johnstone: 4 St Mirren: 7 On the face of it, it feels like there are probably a few clubs in a similar sort of position but there's a definite pressure on us to make sure that the deals we're in for don't fall over because unlike previous seasons right now the players we're short are starting XI guys rather than 12-18.

Aye, I think those specific performances make it feel worse. The 0-0 was a grind. It definitely feels worse when you compare it with our record at FP: P 5 W 4 D 1 L 0 06/03/21 - Motherwell 3 - 1 Livingston 12/08/20 - Motherwell 2 - 2 Livingston 02/11/19 - Motherwell 2 - 1 Livingston 18/05/19 - Motherwell 3 - 2 Livingston 02/02/19 - Motherwell 3 - 0 Livingston

We seemed to struggle in this fixture a fair bit with Robinson in charge as more often than not it felt like his focus was on trying to match Livi or whatever he thought Livi were. Since Livi have been back in the Premiership we're P 5 W 2 D 1 L 2 at the Spaghettihad. Not the best, not the worst. 31/10/20 - Livingston 0 - 2 Motherwell 01/02/20 - Livingston 1 - 0 Motherwell 03/08/19 - Livingston 0 - 0 Motherwell 01/12/18 - Livingston 2 - 0 Motherwell 18/08/18 - Livingston 0 - 1 Motherwell (LC) How Alexander chooses to approach this one? f**k knows. He had a solid 3-1 win at Fir Park last season but he's not managed us on *that* pitch and the whole "I'm still learning about Scottish football" angle he's got going along with our general work-in-progress vibe doesn't exactly inspire confidence at the moment.