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Motherwell FC - A Thread For All Seasons


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21 hours ago, Franz Resch said:

First time caller.

First time caller, long time sufferer...

Was venting after that pish poor performance yesterday. Ultimately Robinson has to fix it sooner rather than later or we will be in trouble. Are there any decent youngsters we could promote to the senior team?

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1 hour ago, thisGRAEME said:

This would suggest it either feel bad about doing this or have stopped.

I don't and I won't. 

HTH.

Oh don’t get me wrong, it amuses me no end. Probably rather we didn’t follow them down though. 

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Probably pish but the Sun are running with Turnbull signing for Celtic this week. Interest from Newcastle and Championship clubs are forcing their hand. 

Offers were more than likely when he proved his fitness. 

Would we not want him to play v Glentoran however. 

I still think £3m is a steal but unless other clubs offer more and he wants to go there then not much we can do. 

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I’m almost certainly talking utter shite here but it has briefly crossed my mind that we may be a better team without Div Turnbull in it atm. 

Particularly against Accies it was abundantly apparent that the majority of players weren’t taking any responsibility in the game, instead choosing to get the ball to Turnbull as quickly as possible in the hope that he conjures up some magic and then they would go back into hiding. Perhaps, it’ll give the other players a kick up the arse and force them to take responsibility.

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7 hours ago, Londonwell said:

I’m almost certainly talking utter shite here but it has briefly crossed my mind that we may be a better team without Div Turnbull in it atm. 

 

7 hours ago, Busta Nut said:

We'd have played the same but with Polworth in for DT.
Polworth is no where near as good as DT and a lot more wasteful with the ball.

I can see where @Londonwell is coming from here. There is absolutely no question that Polworth is on the same planet as Turnbull.  However, we do seem to be very much like an u10 boys team at the moment. "Just give to him and let him score all the goals". 

The others aren't taking responsibility because they know Turnbull has the ability to dig us out of a hole on his own. I'm not saying we'll automatically storm up the table when/if Turnbull goes, but I can see similarities to when McFadden was here first time around. We got better after he left (albeit I know there were other circumstances). 

I'd be alright with £3m as long as we had the sell-on attached. If all goes to plan for DT, we could easily get the same fee again when he moves on. 

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58 minutes ago, Desp said:

I'd be alright with £3m as long as we had the sell-on attached. If all goes to plan for DT, we could easily get the same fee again when he moves on. 

I am not OK with £3m. When you think Scott Brown was sold for £4.4m 13 years ago. 

Hagi supposedly bought for £3.5-4m for Rangers. Even more laughably Rogic apparently could be sold for £4m.  Granted Rogic was a fantastic player but he has hardly kicked a ball and his career is on a downward trend. But if Celtic can replace Rogic with Turnbull and have money to spare that would be the best piece of transfer business. 

Turnbull is a fantastic talent. He scored more goals from midfield before his Op than Lyndon Dykes. He makes it look so easy in a team like Motherwell. You can only imagine what he could do for a team like Celtic. 

I hope the interest form Newcastle is serious so we can ensure we get a good deal. A healthy sell on clause and possible a player or two from Celtic on loan. have they got any good young attacking players ? 

Edited by welldaft
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Scott Brown was probably on more a week at Hibs 13 years ago than Turnbull is on just now. There was also other clubs bidding for him which pushed the price up. Rogic and Hagi are on £15k-£20k plus a week, so no point comparing them.

We'll never get £5m-£6m for a player, ever. We don't pay enough to our players to ever justify that asking price. f**k, Craig Gordon was on five figures a week at Hearts when they punted him for £9m. 

I can never take anyone suggesting Newcastle seriously without thinking about a loan-with-option-to-buy arrangement. 

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The fee would have been agreed with Turnbull and his agent when he signed his new contract.

If not in the actual contract itself, I’m sure there’s at least a verbal agreement between the club and the boy that they won’t stand in his way if a certain bid comes in. If you think 3m is low, just imagine the offers we’d be entertaining if he hadn’t signed his extension and he only had 9 months to run on his contract. 

We’d be lucky to get a million for him.

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There are definitely some parallels to the McCall season, but what I would say to that is that summer we seemed to cut our cloth - for example we replaced Hutchinson with Mark O'Brien on loan - downgrades don't get much more obvious than that.

This season I'd say that on paper, each player seems to be a better prospect than the one he replaced, with the obvious exception of Fox coming in and Gillespie going out, but there is context there.

I think we are performing okay back to middle. Mugabi performed reasonably competently on Saturday and although he's evidently not best suited to left-back, so did Lamie. Felt O'Hara could have imposed himself on the game a bit more, but DT and Campbell were both absolutely fine.

The front three is where our major problems lie. Hastie, Long and White have all been given a sufficient chance and done nothing. Hylton has made no impression off the bench and for me, although he seems to be coming out with a bit of credit, I don't think Seedorf has been particularly good, just not as bad as everyone else. There was one point on Saturday where he was properly bullied off the ball, you wouldn't have got that in the thunderdome era.

Lang was the one I was holding out great hope for, but you would honestly have forgotten he was playing on Saturday. The only one that hasn't had a fair crack of the whip yet is Tony Watt, I would start him on Thursday.

There's a whole chicken and egg situation with not wanting to keep non-performing forwards on. I'm always torn between wanting to give a front-three time to build a relationship and hooking them because I actually harbour ambitions of scoring a goal in the game.

I am dumbfounded that after three friendlies (and probably more bounce games) and five league games that Robinson has as much idea as we do on who to play up front. He shouldn't have given deals to his laddie and Ross MacIver if he didn't think they had the ability to be fringe players. 

As much as Robinson is mainly to blame here, whoever sanctioned all the deals deserves criticism too. It's worrying that in June, Robinson was pleading poverty in saying "it'll be 15-16 first team players with 8 or 9 young lads making up the squad", before signing every man and his dug. I actually do wonder how we are affording all of it as a fan-owned club during a pandemic.

 

Edited by crazylegsjoe_mfc
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29 minutes ago, crazylegsjoe_mfc said:

As much as Robinson is mainly to blame here, whoever sanctioned all the deals deserves criticism too. It's worrying that in June, Robinson was pleading poverty in saying "it'll be 15-16 first team players with 8 or 9 young lads making up the squad", before signing every man and his dug. I actually do wonder how we are affording all of it as a fan-owned club during a pandemic.

Quite easy to explain. Whether accurate or not is another matter. 

We finished 3rd last season which provided a whole £600k more in prize money than the previous season. We sold James Scott for £1m+. The pandemic will cost us £500k in lost revenue as a minimum depending on when fans get back. But during all this we were able to put the entire squad and most staff on furlough at a saving I would estimate at circa £400k+. These are wages we would have been paying. 

I doubt season ticket sales are up on last year but by all accounts they are not much lower so no loss of revenue there. 

We are in Europe and if we can get thru on Thursday should take in a minimum of 450k Euros we never had season before. 

More players have left than have come in and so I would guess our wage bill is slightly under or same as last season. We may get £3m+ for Turnbull and possible a sell on fee for Kipre. 

So from a conservative estimate we would be looking at £5m in more revenue than last season assuming Turnbull is sold. 

 

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1 hour ago, crazylegsjoe_mfc said:

I actually do wonder how we are affording all of it as a fan-owned club during a pandemic.

Given our transfer business, I've been working under the assumption that the Turnbull to Celtic thing has been all but agreed in the background for a while, which might be miles out of course. I don't know all the eligibility rules - but I assume that if DT plays for us on Thursday, he would be cup tied for Celtic should he sign for them - so that might force the pace a bit.

Saturday was utterly predictable and pretty dispiriting to watch but I'm not quite at the "McCall's last season" point despite the similarities - I still think we have a decent enough squad to do ok if we hit on the right combination up front - Watt surely must be due some more game time. The Glentoran game gives me the fear though as any team would fancy sitting in against us at the moment...

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Maybe Robinson has got the nod after his poverty plea that the Turnbull deal was likely, or maybe it was psychologically lowering expectations, but either way, we have 30 first-team players listed on the website and I reckon you could say that seven (Morrison, Devine, Hussein, Cornelius, Semple, Robinson and MacIver) could be considered as the "young boys supplementing the squad", which still gives us 7 players more than he claimed we would have, that's a lot.

Beyond the affordability and practicality of it all, us having a squad that size doesn't make for a happy dressing room in the long term. Trying to keep seven forwards happy is clearly having a detrimental effect on the team in many ways - none more obvious than taking Campbell off to give them all game time on Saturday effectively costing us the game.

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