capt_oats

I mean, I had given up on Hammell months ago but this was broadly my takeaway too. Like, it's a probably unanswerable question but had he kept his job after the Raith debacle would we have seen the changes we saw against St Mirren? Probably not. There was absolutely nothing in his body of work to date to suggest that. @Al B's post at the top of the page is an excellent summary of our major issue this season and tbh, I don't think it's been clear for a lot of folk looking in from the outside what the root cause of our problems has been. Instead they've just watched us and thought we're shite. Which I suppose is fair. To put it in context, for Motherwell supporters watching this team on the regular we've seen cheap, soft goals being given away week in, week out while Hammell was popping up post-game *literally* scratching his head saying "we weren't good enough defensively" but failing on a weekly basis to do anything about it - no change in shape, no change in tactics - just #wegoagain and apparently doing "good work" on the training ground. It's not just the last few games Hammell was in charge, we had months of him highlighting defensive issues but simply not being able to fix them. Without getting into the weeds of things there was a post in our thread shortly before Hammell was emptied that caused a stir across various social media platforms. Who knows if it's true or not but it'd 100% have explained a lot. The long and the short of it was that we were apparently a shambles in training...take what you will from the fact that in Hammell's final press conference he chose to chuck the players under the bus saying that "you need to take personal responsibility for your performance levels. As I said, the information and the quality of training and coaching they get during the week and the plans in place for the games is there. It's them translating that and lifting their performance levels to a level that will get us over the line." (Narrator: they lost to 3-1 against Raith Rovers) Kettlewell had 3 (THREE) days with the team and we immediately looked better organised against St Mirren before keeping a clean sheet against Hearts.

17 minutes and 57 seconds...

Bring him home...

On that point, this is the league table at the point Robinson was named interim after McGhee was binned. We were 2 points worse off than we are now after the same number of games. This was his run to finishing 9th on 38 points...

I mean, sure...but we promoted Robinson in almost exactly the same circumstances (worse in fact) and he ended up being our most successful manager since we were finishing 2nd under McCall. It's a question of whether the issue for us this season has been the players or having a guy in charge with literally no previous first team managerial experience assisted by a guy whose record in management was relegating Albion Rovers and 12 games at East Kilbride.

Sliding doors and all that...

Aye. I'm interested to see what direction he goes here. His quote in the interview was: I mean, before you get into whether or not there are other staff roles he wants looked at the closing date for applications for Chief Executive and Head of Academy coaching was yesterday. So, as it stands, we currently have the following vacancies: Chief Executive Officer Assistant Manager Head of Academy Coaching Lead Development Coach Clearly he only gets a direct say in a couple of those.

In 5 days time we have no chief executive.

Aye. As I said the other day. it's closer to us appointing Robinson post-McGhee than it is Hammell post-Alexander IMO. I think most of us would probably have preferred a deal to the summer and see how it goes but as @RandomGuy. mentioned earlier in the thread that kind of ties your hands when it comes to planning. Not even just recruitment but if we're offering contracts to someone like MJ it feels a tougher sell if we don't know who the manager is after summer. I'm not sure a lot of the "wHy dOn'T tHeY wAiT..." crowd realise how stretched we are in terms of staff at the moment. It didn't go unnoticed by me that Kettlewell hit the point re: staff and structure pretty early on in that interview. Short term it feels like the right choice vs. bringing an external candidate in and hoping they hit the ground running.

Pleased to see that we've clearly gone back to taking facial hair into account with our managerial appointments.

There he is.

You've missed it. It's until the end of next season.

Official

Cheers. We seem like we've got a fairly robust support staff around the place in terms of performance analysis and the like but as Kettlewell mentioned in one of his press conferences last week we're quite understaffed when it comes to actual coaching which is why I was curious. I feel like I've become quite fixated on it but the fact that our first team coaches seem to have amounted to Hammell and Brian Kerr would definitely answer a lot of questions about the way things went under that particular set up. I mentioned earlier in the thread that "The former Ross County boss, 38, takes up his new post today working specifically with our Development and Under 18s teams." line in the news story re: Kettlewell getting the lead development coach role felt quite pointed. There was another line that confirmed he'd be continuing his media work. Dunno, in hindsight it felt like quite a bit of groundwork to emphasise that SK wasn't going to be involved in the first team set-up (he didn't appear on the staff page of the official site either). It's anecdotal but Kettlewell's comment last week that (paraphrasing) he didn't know many of the players personally suggested he hadn't been on the training pitch with them. Alexander had spoken through the summer about wanting to bring in another coach to replace Lasley but it's something Hammell chose not to do. Who knows? Maybe he should ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. As it stands we've got Neil Alexander as GK coach who was a Hammell appointment this season so that's not a role that needs filled. Vacant permanent manager role aside we're down an assistant and (IMO) a first team coach. Until recently we were advertising for someone to step in and replace Clarkson who was promoted to Academy Director last month.

Oh, a sailboat. Those Zoom calls Hammell had with him must have been productive..

Out of curiosity who did Kettlewell have as his assistant at County after Ferguson moved to CEO (I know they were co-managers). In fact, what was the backroom set up like in general with the whole co-manager situation?

In itself, Johnston's contract situation isn't much different to other young players. Cornelius, for example, is out of contract at the end of this season as well. Turnbull had signed multiple extensions before his breakthrough season. The problem now is the number of Academy kids who are being hoovered up by English clubs which is out of step with the sort of contract timetable we seem to work with and puts us in an awkward position. We were burned by overcommitting to the likes of Luke Watt, Dom Thomas etc so broadly we've ended up with a schedule were generally the first pro-contracts are 2 year (Lennon Miller seems to have been a recent exception with a 3 year deal) and are reviewed based on development. We ended up signing Allan Campbell to a 4 year deal in 2017 when he was 19 (coincidentally the same age as Johnston now). I don't doubt we've had discussions and put a contract in front of MJ so that's fine IMO. I don't believe for a second that we've arrived Kate McCallister style in January and realised we've forgotten about Max Johnston's contract. Equally, I don't blame him for choosing to keep his options open. I guess the frustration I have in this specific case is that unlike other previous assets we don't really seem to have had much of a plan for MJ. I don't know if that's a result of not really having had much direction since Craigan exited and cycling through the Mo Ross experiment, hitting the Pandemic then taking months to get Kettlewell in place but from the outside there doesn't seem to have been quite the same sort of joined up thinking there was in the Campbell, Turnbull, Hastie, Scott era.

Aye. I'm fairly certain the official profiles for the likes of Turnbull, Hastie, Campbell, Scott etc had the years they joined the academy like. Actually, here's McKinstry's: https://www.motherwellfc.co.uk/player/stuart-mckinstry/ I mean, they Tweeted about it this morning. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not according to the official site: https://www.motherwellfc.co.uk/player/max-johnston/

Aye. Alexander gave him his debut when he was 17 and we had an injury crisis in the 20/21 season but this is his first established run. He joined the club in June 2020 so in that time he's had Robinson, Alexander, Hammell plus whoever we hire next as his first team manager. It kind of feels like his development hasn't been helped by the amount of flux we've seen in senior positions. It's all been a bit of a mess and if you believe the rumours there was a bit of friction with Alexander apparently not showing enough *trust* in Academy players in general. Unlike someone like say, Allan Campbell, who got his debut then dropped out for a couple of months before firmly establishing himself in the first team it's never really been that clear what the plan has been with Johnston. A part of that may well be that the Reserves league is a complete fucking shitshow though. As I say, he made his debut in the Covid season, was loaned out to QoS 21/22 but picked up an injury for the 2nd half of that one. Then was loaned out to Cove for the first half of this season after Alexander fell out with SOD, signed McGinn as a replacement before being emptied himself after Sligo which left us with 3 right backs. He was being linked with Championship clubs as far back as last summer so his Mr 20% getting his name in the papers isn't anything new here although going by the reporting from the AGM last month Hammell was apparently confident that he'd sign a new deal. In fairness I can't say I blame him for holding off on committing on anything as there's a legitimate question of what the f**k is actually going on at the club in terms of senior positions and general direction.

Aye, it was Cardiff earlier on today as well. Far play, his agent is grafting like f**k. I look forward to the ‘exclusive’ Bayern Munich and Barcelona links tomorrow.

In fairness, Miller is contracted until 2025 so there's a chance we might see him at some point depending on what the script is with his injury atm.

I don't disagree, I realise I'm being Captain Pedant here, but Kettlewell isn't the youth academy director he's Lead Development Coach. Essentially he looks after the Reserves and the 18s. In fairness, given the Reserve league seems to be a colossal shitshow I'm not sure it'd add any more to the disruption. It'd presumably be a case of getting a couple of folk in short term to take that load. Given the fact we only seem to have 2 'football' coaches at the club just now across three teams then there's an argument that we should be hiring anyway. Clarkson's the Academy director, which is why it seems daft to put him up as Kettlewell's assistant given we only fucking gave him the job a month ago having taken since August to announce him in the first place. I've been saying I hope the board have learned their lesson from the Hammell debacle and I'd be much more in favour of everyone just taking a breath and having a think about our next steps with Kettlewell in place until the end of the season rather than just charging ahead and committing to potentially the same mistakes and running the risk of binning another guy by the end of the year. Having thought about it a bit though I guess Hammell/Kettlewell isn't really the comparison in terms of recent internal promotions. I'd say that all things considered it'd probably be closer to us giving Robinson the gig.

Aye, he's on 15 in all comps - 11 in the league. Previous top scorers (all comps): 21/22 - Kevin Van Veen (11) 20/21 - Devante Cole (12) 19/20* - Liam Donnelly/Chris Long (11) - season curtailed 18/19 - David Turnbull (15) 17/18 - Louis Moult (14) - left in December '17 16/17 - Louis Moult (18) 15/16 - Louis Moult (18) 14/15 - John Sutton (13) 13/14 - John Sutton (22) 12/13 - Michael Higdon (27) 11/12 - Michael Higdon (16) 10/11 - John Sutton (17) 09/10 - John Sutton (13) 08/09 - David Clarkson (13) 07/08 - Chris Porter (18) 06/07 - Scott McDonald (16) 05/06 - Richie Foran (12) 04/05 - Scott McDonald (15) 03/04 - David Clarkson (14) 02/03 - James McFadden (19) 01/02 - Stuart Elliot (12) 00/01 - Stuart Elliot (12)

Lads, we no longer have the worst home record in the league.