MJC

I sincerely hope it's the £3M we said we would hold out for and not an 'undisclosed fee' which would hint at us being shafted. He was always going to go but it's all the more annoying that it's to that particular club, and if he does indeed end up there then in all honesty f**k him, I hope his career ends in failure.

See, the heart says that he skins Kagawa here before getting to the byeline and whipping in a pinpoint cross for Olivier Giroud to head in....my experienced Motherwell supporting head says that he is caught in possession which leads to a goal conceded before spending the rest of the game bombing up and down the flank offering nothing....apart from...erm... getting caught in possession whenever he has it.

You clearly also thought yer moniker namesake was a player too....

It was Coyle who scored the double in that first game you mentioned, just after he signed in January 1997 so they might well have been his first goals for the club. It was Scott Howie in goal and not Woods that night and he made a superb save from Paul Wright's re-taken penalty. The referee (Martin Clark I'm sure) was forced off injured after only a few minutes so the linesman took over, but in the days before 4th officials I am absolutely sure that it was someone from the East Stand who ended up running the line. The second game you mentioned was in 2003 and was the start of our Cup run all the way to the semis that year. Daddy scored in front of a big away support and it was a good, proper Cup day out. We went back down there on the Wednesday night and lost 0-1 after Dubourdeu elbowed their player inside the box in the last minute.

Another thing that you just don't see anymore, as is shown in those videos, is the size of our travelling supports. There's a video of a game at Ibrox where we have the entire lower tier of the Broomloan stand and it's more or less full. Again, before TV took its grip but also the pricing was much lower in those days.

It's a good point made by swello regarding us being unable to build a team anymore like we did 20 odd years ago. If you think back to then, we'd Phil O'Donnell breaking into the side as a teenager around 89/90 and was with us until 1994. In that time he was considered one of the best up and coming midfield prospects in the country and had scored a goal which helped take us to a Scottish Cup Final win. If that was now he would have been out of Fir Park within weeks of the Cup Final. Then as has already been mentioned we had Tommy Coyne who played with Ireland in a World Cup yet remained at Fir Park for another four years afterwards. Compare that to nowadays; last season we bring two youngsters into the side who immediately shine, yet one has already moved on and the other will be away shortly, it's so frustrating.

The 6.05pm Sunday kick offs came about in the late nineties, possibly 98 and that's when the TV companies started to take its grip on football. This of course coincided with John Boyle's arrival at Motherwell and the period of overspending which would eventually lead us to the brink. One of the first 6.05pm games I can remember was us v Dundee United on a roasting hot day and Boyle was letting kids in for £1 and adults for a fiver, so the South Stand was packed full of 'Well fans. We won a dreadful game 1-0 with Kai Nyysonen(sp) scoring. It was also around about this time we started playing "Your home town" by Bruce Springsteen at the request of Boyle over the tannoy before every game. Toe curling stuff!

Aye or Scotsport on the Sunday afternoon. It was quite the novelty when we were the main game on either and that's something that you don't get now as highlights are readily available online hours after the game so you don't feel the need to watch Sportscene anymore.

Indeed and he went on to have what was probably his best season with us in 94/95 after that World Cup. As you say it just wouldn't happen now that a player like that with that pedigree would hang around for as long as he did. Maybe I'm looking back through misty eyes at my youth, but football seemed so much more enjoyable back in the 1990s. It was a time when you knew that 95% of your matches would kick off at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon save for the odd midweek match here and there, TV didn't dictate everything, there was less involvement of agents trying to engineer moves for players especially pre-Bosman and there just seemed like more players "played for the jersey". It also helped that we won a Cup at the beginning of the decade, rebuilt our stadium and had a genuinely good team who were in with a shout at the title at one point of course. Just thinking of some of the players we had back then that are true cult heroes and remain so to this day. Coyne, Arnott, Lambert and of course Sieb Dijkstra, who I must add always had the best goalkeepers jerseys that you just don't see anymore with today's plain, bland efforts. They were good times.

Tommy Coyne was a superb player. Not just a goalscorer but a genuinely intelligent player who made the rest of the team tick with the way he held up the ball, picked his passes and found space. For someone who wasn't blessed with pace he always managed to give defenders the run around.

Maybe something to do with our season turning to shite around October 2017, at least in the league anyway. Tanner was the most creative player we had that season until his injury.

I liked Main and it's a shame things didn't work out a bit better for him here as he's definitely a good forward player to have as long as he's not expected to be an out and out goalscorer. He gave me one of my best days following Motherwell in the 2018 Scottish Cup Semi Final when he absolutely ragdolled Aberdeen but he never hit those heights again. He would have benefitted greatly had he been partnered with a Louis Moult type striker last summer, instead Robinson signed Conor Sammon and the rest is history.

The most significant result for us in the last decade, perhaps longer. Most importantly we avoided relegation but on a psychological level, beating Rangers in that manner was massive for us. After years of rolling over to them, we obliterated them on the park over those two games and off the park we stood our ground and gave them the allocation that WE wanted them to get for our home game. Time was, neither would have happened. And showing that bottling shitebag McCall up for the tactically inept simpleton I always had him pegged for was just the icing on the cake.

Referring to themselves as Bears is bad enough but they regularly refer to their female followers as 'Bearettes' on social media...they are a parody of themselves.

Social media has definitely changed an element of their support and club for the worst. They seem to be forever seeking a need to try and play the victim card the way Celtic have always done, whilst at the same time maintaining their sense of entitlement. The ridiculous statements that they have put out over the last few years about any thing that they perceive as a wrong doing to them, no matter how miniscule it may be are testament to that and makes them look even more ridiculous than they already are. The playoff has scarred them for life, particular the social media bampots in their support and we saw a clear indication of that at the League Cup Semi Final in 2017 when they held up a banner about us "being on to misery" or something. Time was, they wouldn't even have acknowledged our support or club like that, but they are clearly rattled by us. If only we could finally find a way to beat them in League matches, it might send a few of them over the edge!

I'm pleased to hear this as it kills the atmosphere stone dead whenever they move away fans from the South stand bottom tier, plus it presents a potential safety hazard for home fans in the PO'D stand when the Old Firm are in town. On the flip side of that it may increase the risk of their fans buying home end tickets should the South Stand sell out, but that's when the club and Motherwell supporters need to 'police' who gets to buy tickets. Well done to Alan Burrows and the board for listening to the support. It's brilliant to have people running the club in touch with the fans, especially when you think back to the days of John Boyle bending over to the Old Firm at every turn.

Fair summation of the season swello. Overall it was a decent season in that it could have obviously been alot better but also could have been alot worse, indeed up until January it looked as though it was going to pan out alot worse than it actually did. The first half of the season was dreadful and there is no other word to describe it. The awful transfer window of last summer set the tone for it and Robinson seriously hampered us by his decision to focus on strengthening the '12-18' instead of the first eleven and we suffered as a result. The League Cup group stages were poor but we did just enough to scrape through, but our exit to Hearts at Tynecastle in the QF was a dire performance, as was our exit to Ross County in the Scottish Cup. Our league form in this period was poor too and entertainment value was non existent as we hoofed the ball aimlessly every week and nothing looked like it would ever change. That Livingston home game in October when we were fortunate to scrape a 1-1 draw was one of the worst performances I've ever seen us put in in my time supporting the club. Things took an up turn from late January onwards however, thanks to us finally changing formation and the emergence of Hastie into the side along with David Turnbull - the undoubted highlight of our season. I don't think we'll see him in a Motherwell jersey again unfortunately, but it's been an absolute privilege to watch this young man play for us, run the midfield and bang in crackers of goals since he came into the side. One thing that has been an irritation throughout the season for me, and I've touched on this before, and I know it's minor and doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but our insistence on wearing that Claret away kit in just about every away game we've played even when the colours don't clash. Why?? And to make matters worse our record while wearing it is rotten. So here's to season 2019/20 and hopefully a new away kit which only gets worn away to Hearts, Aberdeen and Dundee United(probably).

Yes good luck to both Aldred and McHugh for the rest of their careers. Aldred has been a solid, reliable centre half for us over the past year and a bit and he'll be missed. McHugh has been up and down but what he's lacked in ability and at times common sense (on the pitch anyway) he's made up for in effort and commitment and so therefore I wish him well as he leaves us.

I'm sure it was the first time it happened, I certainly don't remember it happening before. I think it was largely borne out of sheer relief more than anything else that day, as it looked for all the world we were doomed to the playoffs when 1-2 down and everything before that goal was going against us and it looked like it just wasn't our day. Memory may be hazy here in my old age but I'm pretty sure we had one cleared off the line just before they went up the park to score their second goal. It was just a ridiculously good strike from Van Der Gaag, he really couldn't have hit that any better if he'd tried and you knew it was in from the second it left his boot.

He is 32 this year and rarely started under Robinson when he was still here two years ago. He was capable of pulling something special out of the hat but was woefully inconsistent and prone to hiding in games. So why should we be re-signing him now, when he's two years older and winding down?!? One of the things I praised Robinson for when he got his first transfer window under his belt was that he moved us away from the jobs for the old boys policy we had operated for years beforehand. If we sign Lionel Ainsworth this summer then we'll be taking backward steps and it will show that the club aren't looking to the future. We are not a retirement home for 30 something veterans looking for one last pay day.

I've just logged on and haven't fully read the last page. So are we seriously linked with re-signing Lionel Ainsworth? Is this fucking serious? I thought we'd got away from the days of re-signing popular ex players who are well into their 30s. When are we signing Faddy for the 20th time then?

I think you'll find my club is very much alive and our timeline was preserved in 2004 when we exited administration after an uncertain and unsettling period. Nae luck.

To be fair to Hearts, that is alot closer than Hibs have gotten to be Champions of Scotland in any time in recent memory....indeed, they have largely/always been playing second fiddle to their (far more successful and bigger) Edinburgh rivals since, erm...??

A good summary of the season. The first six months were utterly awful, in terms of both consistency and entertainment, but since January we've managed to pull away and finish comfortably safe from the drop. The shining light of the season has been the introduction of David Turnbull as a first team regular and also Jake Hastie for his contribution in the past few months; both players provided some much needed 'spark' to the team when it was badly needed. Comparisons will obviously be made with last season given that 2017/18 was fairly memorable for us due to our two Cup Finals and regular Hampden trips, but if we are honest those masked a fairly poor league campaign, arguably no better than this one. If anything, you could say while this season was poor for the first part and better later on, last season started well in the league for us and fell badly away from the October/November time of 2017. This season we suffered badly from a terrible summer of transfer business and we can't afford to repeat that this year so hopefully Robinson has learned his lessons from summer 2018.

I'm the same, with the exception of Stevie Hammell who was our left back for the best part of seventeen years, only Jim Paterson has come close to filling that void. When you think of some of the dross we have signed in that time it's enough to make you shudder. Danny Murphy, one of the Malpas Irish trio that was utterly hopeless, Joe Chalmers, ATS, Straker even. We've not been blessed with good left backs or left sided defenders over the years.