Motherwell FC - A Thread For All Seasons

[welldaft]

We can debate all day the merits of budgetary prudence v lavish overspending. And most sensible fans including myself would always favour the former which I guess is where MFC are at this moment in time.

RG has just listed their forward options - 9 players to choose from v our minimal to non existent choices. 

I hope and expect by the end of the window this will have been addressed.  I just feel somewhere along the line we should have been better placed in terms of forward options.

We could nothing about  Beireth but Shaw, Obika and Wilkinson are firmly on us - Manager / Recruitment etc. Maybe we would have held on to Connor if we knew that Mika was offski.  Either way even having (only) two functioning strikers is far too risky business if one succumbed to injury !

One way or another we have left ourselves woefully undercooked up front and my key point is that could come back to bite us !

 

Edited January 25 by welldaft

[capt_oats]

1 hour ago, redstarcvedza said:

The normal plan would be to supplement bench with the cream of the Academy. This has been difficult in recent times (with the exception of Miller) because the cream is skimmed away by bigger clubs before they get a sniff at the first team

1 hour ago, Handsome_Devil said:

Yeah, that's a fair point...as is SK's about not throwing them in when not ready but you do wonder if he's being a little cautious here. You wouldn't throw in a kid centre half to defend a lead to be fair but Ross got his goal and i don't think has been seen since.

There's a catch-22 of sorts in that us being seen to block the pathway of those Academy players who are at the club presumably makes it easier for the "bigger" clubs to pitch for the best from our Academy on top of the increased resources they can chuck at them.

I mean, our former Academy director binned Max Johnston off on loan (again) rather than finding a way to involve him.

Related to oor Max, I picked up on McMahon mitigating his exit as part of the interview the club put out. He was effectively saying that Johnston's rep had made it clear early on that his client wanted to play abroad etc but we still made an attempt to keep him (and anyway we needed make the contract offer for the development compensation).

Fair enough. Although the implication seemed to be that he (probably) wasn't going to sign a new deal anyway.

I suppose I wondered how that squared with a) Hammell loaning him out because we'd ended up with O'Donnell and McGinn still on the books by mistake and b) Hammell sitting in front of the AGM telling folk that he was confident Johnston would sign a new deal.

That's not to say that I think Bailey Rice would've kb'd Rangers because we'd given some minutes to other Academy players but the club has been is an odd practice/preach situation recently where they've been talking about our commitment to giving Academy weans game time while simultaneously loading the squad with landfill.

Edited January 25 by capt_oats

[capt_oats]

Tbf, nothing he says there is that surprising and let's be honest there would have been heads detached all over the place if we'd signed James Scott on what is effectively a 2.5 year deal - so fair fucks to St Mirren for committing to that.

Additional quotes here FWIW:

Quote

But he said: "I want to get one in first and then I will see where I am from there. What does that leave us in terms of finances?

"There are so many things in question, everything depends on money and availability.

"The situation is evolving all the time, we are having to shift the goalposts depending on being turned down by a player or whether we can afford one, or if we can afford him does that mean it's only one rather than two?

"Because we have had so many injuries, we sometimes have to think about having that cover and ensuring it's maybe more than one."

After Arsenal recalled Biereth to send him out to Austrian title challengers Sturm Graz and successful spells for the likes of James Furlong and Brodie Spencer plus current loanee Georgie Gent, Kettlewell is hoping to persuade major clubs to trust him with their young players.

"We have been working in that fashion, if we are speaking to clubs about young loan players we believe we can evidence the opportunities here and that they will flourish in this environment," he said.

"But that sometimes still comes down to money and relationships with other clubs."

Link

Edited January 25 by capt_oats

[Handsome_Devil]

44 minutes ago, capt_oats said:

I suppose I wondered how that squared with a) Hammell loaning him out because we'd ended up with O'Donnell and McGinn still on the books by mistake and b) Hammell sitting in front of the AGM telling folk that he was confident Johnston would sign a new deal.

I've come to the conclusion that Hammell was being willfully naive or deliberately talking out his arse ok that one.

I also wouldn't take anything SK says re a striker as absolute gospel...yes we want one in quickly but it's better to be without for another game than sign the wrong one or overpay for dross we then just have to move on.

The January window is all about holding your nerve, something it is fair to say we fans on the outside struggle to do.

[well fan for life]

3 minutes ago, Handsome_Devil said:

I've come to the conclusion that Hammell was being willfully naive or deliberately talking out his arse ok that one.

I've mentally separated Hammell the player from Hammell the manager.

Hammell the player: professional, consistent, clever.

Hammell the manager: an idiot.

That's what I assume fuelled the Johnston situation. 

[Blink182]

I suppose another issue of the January transfer window is the manager saying in the press that it's tough and that we've not been able to get player A, B, C and D over the line. As player E it can't be the most exciting thing to see before picking up the phone and hearing Motherwell's offer. 

[welldaft]

Will watch the presser on YT later but must say this brief outtake has fair cheered me up…….

[Handsome_Devil]

26 minutes ago, Blink182 said:

I suppose another issue of the January transfer window is the manager saying in the press that it's tough and that we've not been able to get player A, B, C and D over the line. As player E it can't be the most exciting thing to see before picking up the phone and hearing Motherwell's offer. 

I don't think that really comes into it...they're all pros who will be doing the same thing to clubs from their own perspective.

[ropy]

2 hours ago, RandomGuy. said:

We've done relatively well at punting some, and its really just the moron deals (Crawford being one of our higher earners sitting on a 3yr deal...) still kicking about. One unwanted player already punted this morning. We've rebuilt our squad the last 2 Summers so having "legacy mistakes" is probably kind of normal.

If rumours are true we head into the Saturdays game with Clark, May, Kimpioka, Kane, Jaiyesimi, Carey, Kucheriavyi, Smith and Connor Smith all in the squad for the 3 attacking positions, and potentially the squad being balanced budget wise (i think theyve effectively just written Crawford off as dead money now and ignoring that).

Where would last year’s Bair rank in that list of forwards? 

[capt_oats]

9 minutes ago, Handsome_Devil said:

I don't think that really comes into it...they're all pros who will be doing the same thing to clubs from their own perspective.

Agree with this.

It's another thing that fans probably read too much into ie: the assumption that we speak with one player at a time and only move on to the next one if we get a kb.

It's clearly going to be understood that we'll be speaking to a ton of players, equally players will be speaking to multiple clubs.

Also, where it's pertinent to us, different players will become available at different times due to circumstances - especially in the loan market which is where I assume we're shopping atm.

[18May1991]

All this concern/panic is going to leave us looking collectively daft when the Bair bags a hat trick on Saturday. 

[CoF]

Trying to sign players sounds like an absolute pain in the arse. 

[Swello]

The weird thing is that the law of football cliche means that the January window must be described as "difficult" - but it feels to me like we've done better in January compared to the summer over the years...

I would be very happy to be wrong but if we were going to have a striker in for the weekend, we'd be hearing some rumours via the usual channels* by now.

 

*Scott Burns via cryptic twitter post or @capt_oats spending time on Insta seeing who Georgie Gent is following.

[capt_oats]

[crazylegsjoe_mfc]

I think Hammell was out of his depth speaking publicly. The Snodgrass press conference was an early indicator of that. I honestly think he said he was confident Johnston would sign a new deal to get the question over and done with.

In terms of squad size, we had much smaller squads when we were half decent and we padded the squad out with younger players. It makes you think that we can attribute a lot of our success then to avoiding injuries to key players. In the seasons where we finished 3rd, 2nd and 2nd, really only Steven Saunders and Simon Ramsden had any injuries of note. These days, any time we've a small squad we seem to get injuries by the load. What's changed between then and now? Is it worse physios? Plastic pitches? Is our smaller budget making us go for players with chequered fitness history?

In those days, your bench would be filled with the likes of Page, McHugh, Carswell, ZFA, Moore etc. They all seem a bit more like grown ups, but any youngster on our bench these days is an actual wean. Obviously exceptional cases like Miller can handle it, but I can see why we don't chuck many in. 

Funnily enough, I can't think of a recent success case of one of our players going south to an under 23s side. McKinstry, Leitch, McAlear and Hall are all playing at a lower level than Motherwell now. I'm not sure if I've missed any?

[Busta Nut]

13 minutes ago, crazylegsjoe_mfc said:

Funnily enough, I can't think of a recent success case of one of our players going south to an under 23s side. McKinstry, Leitch, McAlear and Hall are all playing at a lower level than Motherwell now. I'm not sure if I've missed any?

I am sure it's been mentioned before but of all the ones that got away (snapped up as youngsters or were let go) none of them have successfully managed their football at a higher level ( I don't think a similar level either)

['WellDel]

13 minutes ago, crazylegsjoe_mfc said:

Funnily enough, I can't think of a recent success case of one of our players going south to an under 23s side. McKinstry, Leitch, McAlear and Hall are all playing at a lower level than Motherwell now. I'm not sure if I've missed any?

Well theres Lee Erwin who departed for Leeds and is now tearing it up in, eh, Lebanon.

His agent obviously does some job getting him gigs in leagues few others have tried, with Finland and Azerbaijan under his belt too. Fair play to the lad for being willing to give these places a go. I'm assuming some of them are the pub-iest of pub leagues

[camer0n_mcd]

Few folk on twitter saying Montgomery is out for 3 months

[Ron Aldo]

23 minutes ago, camer0n_mcd said:

Few folk on twitter saying Montgomery is out for 3 months

Surely fucking not . 

[Doctor Manhattan]

1 hour ago, crazylegsjoe_mfc said:

In the seasons where we finished 3rd, 2nd and 2nd, really only Steven Saunders and Simon Ramsden had any injuries of note. These days, any time we've a small squad we seem to get injuries by the load. What's changed between then and now? Is it worse physios? Plastic pitches? Is our smaller budget making us go for players with chequered fitness history?

25 minutes ago, camer0n_mcd said:

Few folk on twitter saying Montgomery is out for 3 months

For f**k's actual f**king sake. 

In all seriousness, can we try just not training for the rest of the season? As an added bonus, it couldn't make our passing (or throw ins, or corners) any worse.