capt_oats

It feels like we're kind of caught between 2 stools at the moment. Kettlewell's been in charge for 25 games and we've only failed to score in 3 of them. Twice against St Mirren this season and yesterday against Rangers at Ibrox. The last 2 games is the first time we've failed to score B2B under Kettlewell. We've obviously pivoted from the 3412 to this 3421 because of all the injuries which is getting us a foothold in games and giving us (effectively) 4 central midfielders on the park which has plus points and when you look at our performances you'd say that it's broadly working but there are also some (obvious) drawbacks. Big CareBair is, ironically given the echo chamber doubling down @Casagolda mentions, doing the stuff he was brought to the club to do. He's acting as a foil - I'd be surprised if there was ever any expectation that a) he'd play as much as he had or b) that we'd get many goals out him. I'd imagine we'll stick with the 4 CMs against Celtic at the weekend but after that given we had Shaw and Wilkinson come off the bench yesterday I guess the decision is whether we drop one (Paton?) to get a 2nd striker on the park from the start.

So you think that 90% of the Motherwell posters were born after 18th May 1991? So, 90% of us are younger than 32 (4 months and 7 days)? Interesting.

It'll be interesting to see how we react to our impending scuddings off Rangers and Celtic as by this time next week we'll have lost 3 on the bounce and thus far we've only lost 3 games in total under Kettlewell and none B2B. Looking at it from a big picture POV we're sitting on 10 points after 5 games. If we're saying we need roughly 36 points to be safe then we're looking at gaining another 26+ points from 33 games - an average of 0.78 PPG minimum. For perspective that's a worse PPG average than Hammell had when we eventually launched him (Hammell's PPG average was 0.83 PPG) and at the very least Kettlewell's shown himself to be a competent enough manager. Even an average of 1 point per game from now until GW 33 would have us on 38 points at the split. That said, I wouldn't be making any definite guarantees as we've a thin squad and our bench of late has comprised a number of actual children but with long term injuries like Butcher, Biereth still to come back you'd hope that even if/when we regress to the mean as most of us are expecting we should still have enough about us to trundle our way to safety.

Sean Goss has a new club

I see that's the Well Society mailshot out with candidates for the board election landed.

Someone on Steelmen mentioned that they'd heard he had a club in Greece lined up on the day we announced he'd been released.

We announced we'd mutualled him a week ago on Monday (11th) which was when the Greek window closed and meant he could move there as a free agent. https://www.motherwellfc.co.uk/2023/09/11/joe-efford-leaves-the-club/ They officially announced him on the 16th (Saturday). Having just checked I think it was this Tweet that I saw rather than the club one.

It seems they announced 5 days ago. I noticed it at the time but genuinely thought it was a fake Tweet and it didn't seem to be picked up by any of the sports pages here. Announcement went up on the 16th - 5 days after we posted about him having been mutualled. The Greek window closed on the 11th September which is the day we released him so I guess it was a done deal. Absolutely fair fucks to everyone concerned if this has ended up a Danzaki scenario where we've not had to take a hit.

Right enough, so it was.

Aye. There's something not quite right there and it was interesting that Kettlewell spoke about the issue being about our we were set up in terms of stopping the cross coming in or whatever. SOD and Bevis switch men at the back post but Tanser is always free. No one engages the laddie crossing the ball whether that should be Paton or Spencer IDK but either way Blaney and Spencer are doubled up on one man. It just feels a bit messy and lookw like an organisation thing as much as anything. It doesn't seem controversial to say it's where we're missing Butcher - I could be wrong but is that not the first time we've had a 3 of Casey, Mugabi and Blaney starting together?

Wilko and Souaré move on to the "Doubtful" tier.

Aye. Dundee's equaliser comes from a similar area and situation (Watkins header for Killie anaw). I mean, this will clearly change after the next two games but broadly we seem reasonably solid defensively. We've only conceded more than a single goal in one game so far this season - the Lamie start against QoTS - but regardless of whether it's stopping the cross or defending the back post conceding from that area feels like it's a potential weakness.

Sorry. Citation required.

Each to their own and all that but this is very much the energy St Mirren fans seem to be giving at the moment and it's absolutely no surprise that pretty much every match thread they're involved in is an absolute fucking bin fire:

100% this btw. Actual adult humans getting worked up about "who's bigger" is a heavy VL energy.

HBD Toby Not OTD but that strip...

Mentioned this before but assuming Alexander had signed an initial deal through to the end of the 21/22 season (same as pretty much all the managers we've parachuted in mid-season) then the January extension felt like a reasonable point for him to get the new deal especially given our form for the calendar year 2021, whether it needed to be through to 2025 or not is a different story and the wheels clearly went flying off from that point on. I guess the more obvious parallel is Robinson - he was made interim manager after McGhee was binned then got it permanently 15th March 2017 through to May 2018, we then gave him an extension on 13th October 2017 to the end of 2020 (the week before the LC semi-final against Rangers). He and Lasley got further extensions to 2022 on 18th July 2019 - a year before their existing deals were due to expire. I mean, it broadly worked out but that first extension, an extra 2 years 7 months after he'd got the job, in hindsight, feels very much where we were at that point. As far as Kettlewell goes I'd have thought that holding off until January and seeing where things stand would make sense for everyone. I guess the next step for him/the club is extensions for players currently in the building that he'd want to keep around. He's already spoken publicly about us failing to get out in front of things in terms of of protecting out assets with Max Johnston, I'm pretty sure he's also spoken about wanting to get a sit down with Kelly about extending. We've an absolute ton of players OOC in the summer (at least 21 by my count) and even setting aside the whole protecting assets side of things we should have a new deal on the table for Lennon Miller as he's a first team player now and should be weighed in as such.

Something I noticed a while back, I don't know if this is common practice or if it was just a mistake, there was a photo used in one of the training updates that was actually from the week before. This one went up on August 10th but Arseblog had used the same image to announce the loan on August 3rd:

Tbf, we posted a £1m loss for 21/22 (albeit that was off the back of a £3.5m profit the season before and like Saints we had £4.2m+ cash at hand), St Mirren posted a £1.5m loss, Aberdeen £2.2m etc, etc. I'm not really sure there's much to pile on over. It seems we're in a broadly similar position to Saints - @PauloPerth mentioned a post I'd made in our thread about our turnover of players in here a while back and Kettlewell has spent the summer making it clear that part of his remit has been to get our budget down to a figure that the board are more comfortable with - in fact he talked about it at length in his press conference yesterday (and there was a fair amount of chat in our thread about it). It wouldn't be a massive surprise if we're looking at a similar loss when our accounts are published at the end of the year given we sacked 2 managers plus their assistants and signed 9 players in January to dig us out a hole. Obviously this shouldn't really be that much of a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to what Saints fans have been saying although I'm curious, having not read any of the coverage of this is the loss entirely down to Davidson and his spending/sacking or have you actually been spending money on other stuff as well? eg: a contributing factor to our loss was capital expenditure on stadium upgrades and we spent £1m+ on installing a new pitch.

Genuinely LOL'd when he said that.

McFadden talking about Robinson on Open Goal. Quite a lot going on between the lines here...

It’s apparently to allow us to sell it as a PPV game.