capt_oats

Agree, although it also tracks with what he was saying in his presser yesterday about us maybe having to be creative and looking "further afield". It sounds like one of those that may have appeared on our radar through TransferRoom 2021, 2022 - I think you linked to an article by Daws years ago about the set up where - which I'm assuming is where/how the likes of Sol and Efford ended up with us. His Wiki isn't up to date in so much it's not showing this season. As it stands far he's on 3 for this season - which again maybe makes him that bit more realistic vs his apparent 13 in 35 last season? Going by Transfermarkt his contract is up in the summer although the club apparently have an option. https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/alen-ozbolt/profil/spieler/245070

He’s Slovenian

Cribbing this from an old post but it's interesting to compare how many players we've signed recently had known injury issues. I could be wrong but of the Alexander signings only Ojala fits that bracket for me. Hammell obviously just phoned up Moult and Aarons to ask if they wanted a game and but Obika had missed most of the season with Morecambe with a hamstring (but again, there's context for how his signing came about). Maybe it's recency bias but it definitely feels like we've been leaning far more heavily on the gamble that the player stays fit this season than others. To add, so it's not 3 posts in a row from me... Oh...

To Devils Advocate: I'd guess that from reading between the lines on McMahon's interview Souaré was never meant to be a main guy in so much as we seemed to place many (if not all) our eggs in the 'we're re-signing' James Furlong basket which then got blown up by Brighton just deciding to sell him to Hull instead leaving us to scramble and bring in Georgie instead who maybe isn't exactly 1:1 with Furlong. Obika - he was already in the building and again, reading between the lines - was probably willing to take the deal and squad role that Mandron wasn't With Montgomery, I'd guess we took Celtic on their word if they've said 'yeah, he's fit lads'. Who knows, maybe that was reflected in whatever % of his wage we've been asked to contribute and you weigh up that he's young but had an injury which you're being told he's recovered and it maybe allows you a bit more budget to put towards a new centre forward or whatever. Like I get it but I think it probably all comes down to the fact that Kettlewell has been told to work to the budget that he's been given and it's pushing us towards these risk/reward deals.

Aye, it's not a popular opinion and there no doubt that cramming a bunch of games into December to have a break in January is probably counter-intuitive. At worst, the optics are a bit daft. That said, I've always felt that the winter break has been good for us and whether it's a directly contributing factor or not the fact that we generally seem to have seen an uptick in form after the January break is evidence of that to some degree. Dunno, to me, for a club our size the break allows us to recruit, bed in players, get players back from injury and just generally reset without games making the whole thing a bit chaotic has always, objectively, seemed beneficial.

Here's wee Monty's time at Fleetwood in the first half of the season: https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/adam-montgomery/leistungsdaten/spieler/757272 I guess what I'm saying is that there was probably a chance this might happen...

I mentioned Hutchison's comments about our medical bills prior to him getting involved the other week. His view was that we were spending a lot of money on treating preventable injuries which led to the strength and conditioning department being set up. Again, I don't know if it's similar to Weir and McMahon's view on the media department or not but we created various additional roles on Alexander's watch: Tom Jones - now at Stoke and Callum Davidson - who moved to Wigan after us, were both 'Sports Therapist' and 'Performance Therapist' respectively. However presumably their contracts were up at the end of last season and they don't seem to have been replaced (the roles aren't showing on the 'Staff' tab on the official anyway). I mean, prior to the Alexander restructure we were running with Andy Boles handling S&C so I can understand why there may be a view that investing in additional support staff is superfluous spending. Having said that, if our budgeting is forcing the recruitment model into a place where we're having to focus on the risk/reward type of signings @crazylegsjoe_mfc mentions (eg: players who become available to us specifically because they have/had injury doubts) then it feels like a false economy to sign injury risk players but not have a support system in place to minimise injury. Especially if the instruction the manager is being given is to run with a small squad. Modern fitba' is an environment where the turnaround between seasons is becoming shorter but players (in general not just Motherwell) are being asked to perform at the same - if not increased - intensity and people are wondering why we're seeing more injuries? Given the nature of the injuries we've seen I don't think you can or should necessarily level criticism at coaching/staff etc but equally I'd hope someone in a senior role at the club is at least looking at the number of injuries and asking the question "what the f**k is going on and is it preventable?" rather than just shrugging their shoulders and putting it down to bad luck.

Wilkinson

Agree with this. It's another thing that fans probably read too much into ie: the assumption that we speak with one player at a time and only move on to the next one if we get a kb. It's clearly going to be understood that we'll be speaking to a ton of players, equally players will be speaking to multiple clubs. Also, where it's pertinent to us, different players will become available at different times due to circumstances - especially in the loan market which is where I assume we're shopping atm.

Tbf, nothing he says there is that surprising and let's be honest there would have been heads detached all over the place if we'd signed James Scott on what is effectively a 2.5 year deal - so fair fucks to St Mirren for committing to that. Additional quotes here FWIW:

There's a catch-22 of sorts in that us being seen to block the pathway of those Academy players who are at the club presumably makes it easier for the "bigger" clubs to pitch for the best from our Academy on top of the increased resources they can chuck at them. I mean, our former Academy director binned Max Johnston off on loan (again) rather than finding a way to involve him. Related to oor Max, I picked up on McMahon mitigating his exit as part of the interview the club put out. He was effectively saying that Johnston's rep had made it clear early on that his client wanted to play abroad etc but we still made an attempt to keep him (and anyway we needed make the contract offer for the development compensation). Fair enough. Although the implication seemed to be that he (probably) wasn't going to sign a new deal anyway. I suppose I wondered how that squared with a) Hammell loaning him out because we'd ended up with O'Donnell and McGinn still on the books by mistake and b) Hammell sitting in front of the AGM telling folk that he was confident Johnston would sign a new deal. That's not to say that I think Bailey Rice would've kb'd Rangers because we'd given some minutes to other Academy players but the club has been is an odd practice/preach situation recently where they've been talking about our commitment to giving Academy weans game time while simultaneously loading the squad with landfill.

Aye. In his 40 minute interview I think Weir said something along the lin es of the gap between where we were and an appropriate spend was the equivalent of shedding 4 or 5 first team players. Which sounds drastic but the reality is we probably managed to go some way to achieving that by simply opting out of the Reserves League (which was a farce of a league anyway). When you look at the number of bodies we've generally carried whether it was Robinson, Alexander or Hammell we've invariably had 25, 26, 27 or even 28 - so it's kind of been normalised but the question is/was why these extra bodies were actually there. What were they actually contributing? Clearly it's easy to be wise after the fact but it doesn't necessarily mean it should be ignored as a point. In that respect this season has been a bit of an eye opener in terms of what I assume is historic wastage. How much value did we actually get from the Petravicius, George Newell, Christy Manzinga and Christian Ilic's of the world? Robinson's approach of just piling hats on top of hats then cutting them loose at the end of the season contributed to the culture of player turnover we've seen and tbh, without wanting to invoke the Candyman, casting a glance over towards Paisley he's still at it. Clearly the Covid season was just weird and we had a ludicrously large squad as a result of injuries - I think by the time Alexander got his feet under the desk we had a 35 man first team squad which the subsequent accounts cited an extra £500k spend as a result of the January trolley dash for the likes of Big Weird Harry and erm...Eddie Nolan. I'd still argue that being overly strict about caps and limiting the manager is something of a false economy if we have funds kicking about but equally it's been interesting to see how efficient we've been in terms of getting players out (especially in light of @RandomGuy.'s point about their squad size and the number of players they're trying to shift).

I was genuinely surprised to find that Dundee are only 3 points better off than we were last season under Hammell after the same number of games.

There's context to that as well - we signed him (initially) because Mandron was injured after his first game and we were left scrambling late in the window for a vague approximation. He was actually announced after the window had closed. Basically if Mandron doesn't get injured then we probably don't sign Obika. Quite why we chose to extend his deal is less clear - especially after he'd also picked up another hamstring injury during his initial spell - although I expect it might have something to do with him having done well in that role on the occasions he'd made it on to the park along with being willing to accept whatever terms we were offering.

Aye. That's where he played for us. "He can play anywhere across the front three." classic Robbo.

Yeah, he missed the Hibs game before the break, the Alloa game at the weekend and was listed as 'out' in the pre-match blurb that went out from the club yesterday (probably because he was being trebucheted to Yorkshire at the time). Like, don't get me wrong he's done nothing for us and as @Handsome_Devil says it's definitely convenient for us to cancel the loan based on injury rather than phoning Barnsley up saying "actually he's shite, you can have him back" but I'd be surprised if we'd cancel the loan without plans to bring others in (although the Biereth situation seemed to blindside us). Whether the folk we bring in are any good or not is a different question I guess.

Tbf his loan has been cancelled because he's injured not because he's shite. It's pretty pointless having a player on the books who isn't going to contribute if you have the option to cut ties and free up budget.

Tbh, that's kind of why I was looking at us being interested in Scott as having a potential upside (optimistically overlooking the fact he hasn't kicked a baw since we got coin for him) since with the addition of Nicholson we'd have a couple of players who can play wide - if that's what we wanted to do - and a Halliday, Davor and Miller midfield 3 could be robust enough. Like, going (shock) 433 probably puts us in a weird place trying to accommodate Spittal but simply having something vaguely resembling a Plan B would be quite nice. I mean that's not to say that there aren't other players out there with a similar skillset and profile to Scott so if we're still in the market for someone like that it probably wouldn't be the worst thing.

I had a swatch at YouTube last night: I mean...fine?

I think another aspect is the question of what shape we're playing as it probably has a knock on in terms of what we still need. With Biereth and Wilkinson away and Oli Shaw tbc as leaving that's (potentially) 3 bodies out but if the plan is to stick with one central striker then presumably we don't need to replace all 3 whereas if we're planning on playing with 2 up then chances are we do unless we're expecting some sort of Lazarus situation with Obika. Similarly between Montgomery, Gent and Halliday we probably don't need any cover for LWB. Short lived as it was I was pleasantly surprised by the Scott Fraser link as it was someone who you'd have thought would have been a level above what we had/have. Scott on the other hand, would maybe have been fine and we know he can play both wide and as a second striker but it's difficult not to echo @thisGRAEME's point yesterday that given it's so long since he's actually been good it'd have been a risk - which is kind of the opposite of Fraser. If we're sticking with the 3421 sort of shape this is kind of where we look to be at the moment (IMO) another 3 in would have us brought 7 in in total and carrying a squad of 24 (including injuries) which doesn't actually sound that far off what Kettlewell was talking about before the window opened in so much as he wanted to add a couple more on top of what we already had (which I think was around 22 bodies at the time).

McGinley's a weird one - he was signed by Stephen Robinson in the Pandemic season and by his own admission he found it pretty difficult to settle what with the lockdown situation and all that. By all accounts he just generally seemed to have quite a shite time as he was up here on his tod. He was supposedly brought up as a left sided centre back but ended up playing left back and he just generally looked quite awkward at this level. After Robinson resigned and Jake Carroll got himself fairly needlessly sent off against Dundee at Fir Park Alexander started playing him regularly. He wasn't an attacking full back/wing-back and he doesn't really *look* like a footballer but broadly he seemed to do what Alexander told him to which meant he stayed in the team which in turn meant he became a bit of a lightning rod for sections of the support who weren't exactly taken with Alexander's brand of football. The assumption seemed to be that he'd be released at the end of his contract given the whole thing about him finding it difficult to settle but instead Alexander decided to offer him a new deal, presumably because he's a player who did what he was told and padded out the squad but it definitely rubbed quite a few in the support the wrong way. Following that he picked up an injury and he effectively disappeared for well over a year - which is where it got a bit weird. The club never clarified exactly what the nature of the injury was and hasn't really kicked a baw since. He made it back in and around the squad this summer where we loaned him out to Thistle but he didn't play a minute for them. Tbh, he should be fine for League 2 if that's where he ends up. There's no reason why he couldn't do a turn at that sort of level. It's apparently an accountancy degree he's been doing and from the outside looking in I'd say that part-time would probably suit him if he's just wanting to get back to kicking a ball.

No. That was Connor Smith. Had no idea he'd been mentioned as being in on trial but either way, coming off the back of c***s talking about Zak Rudden this doesn't feel like the worst. I'd imagine he'll fit in as either the #10 that Spittal plays or as one of the inside forwards of the 3.