Motherwell FC - A Thread For All Seasons

[boozyBJ]

We go again on Wednesday, who we playing? Oh f**k

[rowsdower]

I can't think of a slower motherwell side. I think lamie is our fastest player. I haven't seen Kelly run.

I thought shields was fast, but I think what it is, is that he looks he should be fast. His muscles are like racing stripes.

I admire spittal. To have the number of goals and assists that he has when he's that slow is some achievement. When I played, all I had was pace and being left footed. I've never been able to figure out how to play now that I'm excruciatingly slow. I think he loses players and finds space because they underestimate his slowness and run right by him. I'm going to try being slower.

I think Slattery has overcompensated and lost some of his c**tishness.

Decisions aside, I hate var so much. Absolutely ruined some great moments in the game, and we had about 20 mins of hold ups to confirm the ref was right. It's not going to get better either.

['WellDel]

34 minutes ago, thisGRAEME said:

We're a team absolutely crying out for...basically a bunch of the players that left.

O'Hara barrelling around midfield, and Roberts with a bit of pace and aerial ability out wide, Woolery with some direct running, would improve us immeasurably right now. Looking down the bench every week at the moment and it's basically "chuck moult on I guess" because there's f**k all else. Desperation point for just more bodies and something different than what we have.

Fully agree that a combative midfielder and a powerful, direct player would improve us considerably. I'd ideally add to that a commanding centre half, capable of marshalling the back line and bollocking the midfield to track runners. On their game our midfield are competent enough going forward but teams play through us virtually unchallenged too easily and too often. The centre half pairing have a calamity in them every single week. We really need someone to shore things up and give us a reliable base to build from. f**k knows how we do all that in a January window though. 

[thisGRAEME]

Also, see on Hallidays goal, am I being unfair that Kelly bollocking the ten in front of him is all well and good but it was a shot across his body he should've saved?

[Allroy for Prez]

Some finish from Van Veen for the disallowed goal. Would be great to see him and Moult on the pitch at the same time.

But aye, I’m worried at how this season is going to pan out.

[Archie McSquackle]

We're a team absolutely crying out for...basically a bunch of the players that left.
O'Hara barrelling around midfield, and Roberts with a bit of pace and aerial ability out wide, Woolery with some direct running, would improve us immeasurably right now. Looking down the bench every week at the moment and it's basically "chuck moult on I guess" because there's f**k all else. Desperation point for just more bodies and something different than what we have.

It was obvious to everyone that we'd become slower over the summer and the loss of Woolery and Roberts meant we didn't have the option to introduce pace into the team to give the opposition something to think about. To be fair to Hammell he publicly mentioned a lack of pace, brought in Aarons and somehow found a player in Joe. Unfortunately they're both now broken and we're back to being completely one-paced although probably moving the ball quicker than we did under Alexander.

[ropy]

Where was our extra man? See also last week.

[YassinMoutaouakil]

Scunner of an afternoon but good to see Moult balling out as predicted. Winner on Wednesday. 

[ropy]

I might be going soft, various things to be disappointed about but I enjoyed my day out.

Apologies to anyone behind me in the queue to get in. The steward asked me to empty my pockets - he was left holding a ted baker bag in which I had been carrying extra clothing layers, my DAB radio, 2 face masks that have been in my jacket since Covid, my phone, my wallet, a handkerchief, my door key, a handful of loose change, my GTN spray in case of heart issues, a half full bottle of hand gel, my ticket, a leaflet about McCrae’s Battalion and I draped round his neck the cable for my iPhone earphones.  He managed to balance them all then said it was ok and I put them all back after first stopping to blow my nose.

[well fan for life]

Given myself a few hours before I had a full cranial detachment. It is very, very fucking annoying how soft we are. Guaranteed to ship at least one shit goal every week. 

Sol is a beautiful, beautiful man however, unfortunately, he's rubbish at football. He can't defend and is ponderous in possession. Bring back Bevis. But preferably sign somebody new in January. 

Our midfield still has a big 6 shaped hole in it. Goss & Slattery are grand but we need someone to throw some hammers in front of the back four. I actually enjoyed us going to a 3-5-2 today. Penney's magic on the ball, Spittal is more effective going forward in it and it means we don't need to play Connor fucking Shields. 

Moult even if he's not fit changed the game big time. Without him coming on there's no chance we come back. 

Anyway. I'll not be there Wednesday. I'm off to see these lads:

 

[welldaft]

14 minutes ago, well fan for life said:

Given myself a few hours before I had a full cranial detachment. It is very, very fucking annoying how soft we are. Guaranteed to ship at least one shit goal every week. 

Sol is a beautiful, beautiful man however, unfortunately, he's rubbish at football. He can't defend and is ponderous in possession. Bring back Bevis. But preferably sign somebody new in January. 

Ask him to head the ball and he will do so all week. Well if it is coming straight at him.

For the 1st goal Halliday gets to the ball and he is between both Lamie and Sol. So a midfielder gets there before two guys whose job it is to defend these crosses. Every fkin game we will concede from a cross ball. Rangers had 51 crosses into the St Johnstone box today. Admittedly St Johnstone got the breaks but with those stats Rangers would have scored double figures against us. 

As for the winning goal. Every player now knows to keep your hands down when the opposing player is aiming a cross at or near you. Sol thinks this is the best time to do an Orangutan impression. It is so poor and infuriating. Work so hard to get back into the game and that is how we lose it. I don’t think anyone was that surprised least of all Sol. He was almost resigned to what he had done. 

He is hard not to like but that is being sorely tested today. 

[ropy]

It would be interesting to know how it came about that Moult took the penalty, was it predetermined, did KVV allow Moult to get his name on the scorers list, did Moult have the most confidence on the day?

[Hendricks]

Think you've got a decent side there given your budget and resources. Several very decent players at our level and really should be competing for 5th/6th this season. Will definitely have some good results throughout the season. Play pretty open so defensively more difficult to get positive outcomes against the better teams but no reason why you can't be showing consistency against most of the league. 

[JamesP_81]

Sol to be doing laps of the training ground with his arms tied to his sides tomorrow imo. 

[Kapowzer]

20 minutes ago, Hendricks said:

Think you've got a decent side there given your budget and resources. Several very decent players at our level and really should be competing for 5th/6th this season. Will definitely have some good results throughout the season. Play pretty open so defensively more difficult to get positive outcomes against the better teams but no reason why you can't be showing consistency against most of the league. 

Meh, when you repeatedly let opposition players move from the middle third to the final third unchallenged, skipping by 3 to 4 of our players on the way then you start to get annoyed. Completely mixed bag this season, absolutely no consistency. Snatched a win against the odds in Paisley, Destroyed Aberdeen at Pittodrie, Rightfully beaten at Rugby Park, couldn't put a rudderless Dundee United to the sword at home, defeated 3-0 by you guys in the most un 3-0 game you'll ever see.

Don't know if you drop in here often but we were seemingly hampered by lack of board confidence in Alexander. That resulted in not releasing all funds and missing out on the better options in the summer window, settling for familiar faces on loans. Yet again after a "successful" season financially we didn't capitalise in the transfer market with the increased revenue. Pace was lacking but Penney has some, Efford did, but few on here expected much of him until 5 games ago.

Who's knows if Boyce hadn't got injured if you would have shown interest in Snodgrass. Maybe he would have make things better for us.

We can only hope anything left over from the summer is in the warchest for January, we may need it.

Regardless I think most of us are just scunnered that we gain a man advantage yet again for the majority of the match and turn to shit. Said in the match thread we had Hearts on the ropes until our second then took the foot off the gas rather than continuing it. They scored and we pin them back again. We need to learn to play like that when we're drawing or have the lead.

We're too soft and not ruthless at the moment.

[Busta Nut]

6 hours ago, thisGRAEME said:

Also, see on Hallidays goal, am I being unfair that Kelly bollocking the ten in front of him is all well and good but it was a shot across his body he should've saved?

Kelly isnae very good.

[Handsome_Devil]

7 hours ago, Hendricks said:

Think you've got a decent side there given your budget and resources. Several very decent players at our level and really should be competing for 5th/6th this season. Will definitely have some good results throughout the season. Play pretty open so defensively more difficult to get positive outcomes against the better teams but no reason why you can't be showing consistency against most of the league. 

That's a fair assessment based on one or two games, over the season to date it's somewhat different. Playing a 50-50 (or better) occasionally in losing lets you take heart from the performance, doing it three weeks out of four as we do is relegation material.

It was clear in summer we needed a first choice CB, six and second (actually fit) striker. The scenarios are:

1) Hammell disagreed and has judgement so bad he won't make a manager.

2) Hammell agreed but this squad is as good as we can afford and we as such should brace for relegation, this season or shortly.

3) Hammell agreed but it was decided we could muddle through to January and get better value then before a proper rebuild in summer.

I still think option 3 is the most likely right now but the first two obviously don't have a non-zero probability, as those discussing nuclear armageddon like to put it

[well fan for life]

6 hours ago, Busta Nut said:

Kelly isnae very good.

He's not terrible but he's not the world class goalkeeper some folk think. In our list of keepers over the years I'd probably go.

Randolph

Carson

Gillespie

Ruddy

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kelly.

[Ron Aldo]

In the summer, a striker was probably top of our list of priorities but come January we need to be signing a commanding centre half and a defensive midfielder.

Ricki Lamie is still Ricki fucking Lamie. There was a reason we were happy to let him go Dundee and a few decent games under Alexander doesn't change the fact that he's average at best and utter dug meat at worst. Likewise with Sol, he's a handsome b*****d but nothing I've seen since he signed suggests he's very good at football. A defender in the mould of Peter Hartley (first time round) or Tom Aldred would make a massive difference to this team.

In midfield we have loads of tidy footballers but no one who can actually tackle meaning we're so easy to play through. I might get pelters for this but when Alex Gogic was floating about without a club during the summer I thought we should have went for him (maybe we did, who knows). I saw some folk suggesting Barry Maguire should be playing there but if that's the best we can do it shows how desperate we are.

[capt_oats]

4 hours ago, Handsome_Devil said:

That's a fair assessment based on one or two games, over the season to date it's somewhat different. Playing a 50-50 (or better) occasionally in losing lets you take heart from the performance, doing it three weeks out of four as we do is relegation material.

It was clear in summer we needed a first choice CB, six and second (actually fit) striker. The scenarios are:

1) Hammell disagreed and has judgement so bad he won't make a manager.

2) Hammell agreed but this squad is as good as we can afford and we as such should brace for relegation, this season or shortly.

3) Hammell agreed but it was decided we could muddle through to January and get better value then before a proper rebuild in summer.

I still think option 3 is the most likely right now but the first two obviously don't have a non-zero probability, as those discussing nuclear armageddon like to put it

I think 3 is the most probable based on what we know as well.

When Hammell got the job we had 4 centre backs in Lamie, Johansen, Mugabi and Ojala whereas our options up front were KVV, Shields, Efford and Morris. Hammell all but said at the time that his priority was the forward options.

We clearly mutualled Ojala but didn't bring anyone in to replace him - I guess we'll never know if we tried or not. Either way being objective the feeling seemed to be that in a numbers sense we'd have enough serviceable CBs to get through to January compared with the apparent dearth of goals in the team (despite what Alexander was claiming pre-season).

To that point, up until yesterday we had conceded the (joint) 3rd fewest goals in the league (we're 5th now - behind Celtic, Rangers and having conceded a goal more than both Livi and St Johnstone). Also, of Hammell's now 16 games in charge we've kept clean sheets in 6 which isn't the best but also isn't the worst.

Fwiw, we're also 5th in goals scored.

The obvious problem is the games we're not keeping clean sheets in. Of those 10 games we've only lost 1-0 in in one of them (and won one 3-2 tbf). I've now officially lost count of the number of games Hammell's come out and spoken about being "disappointed" and us having lost "poor" goals.

IMO we're definitely salvageable but the concern is that I don't think we have what's needed to fix us in the building at the moment.

Edited November 7, 2022 by capt_oats