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Motherwell FC - A Thread For All Seasons


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22 minutes ago, Busta Nut said:

I gave up on that.
Can someone who read it give me the TL:DR version?

We've got hunners of injuries, Craig Levein is going nowhere and Michael Stewart is a w**k. 

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10 hours ago, PauloPerth said:

Good documentary on BBC alba tonight about the 1991 cup win.  I'm guessing it's been around a while?

Was it done by the BBC originally, or a club effort that the BBC screened?

Yeah, think it came out a year or so ago. Was really good. It was part of a series of documentaries Alba done, they had one about the Dundee Utd '87 UEFA Cup team and another about Tommy Burns. Both excellent if you're able to track them down. 

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I don't expect Turnbull to play for us again but by God we could do with him right now. That team badly needs that wee bit of quality, that wee spark to turn our possession in the final third into goals. Campbell's goal today was an excellent one from a really good move but we just don't have enough of that currently.

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15 hours ago, MJC said:

I don't expect Turnbull to play for us again but by God we could do with him right now. That team badly needs that wee bit of quality, that wee spark to turn our possession in the final third into goals. Campbell's goal today was an excellent one from a really good move but we just don't have enough of that currently.

We’ve scored 10 goals in our last 4 games, we could easily have had half a dozen more as well with the chances we passed up. That wasn’t the problem for me yesterday.

The problem was we shipped 2 soft as f**k goals, just like we did at Tynecastle last week. You can’t expect us to score 3 goals every week and when we don’t, you have to be able to grind out results. 

Since the proper stuff started, we’ve only had 2 clean sheets in 7 games. By contrast, we’ve conceded 2 plus goals in 4 of those 7 games. We keep conceding goals at that rate and we will need to score 3 plus every week just to get a result. 

The space Gardyne had to run into at the equaliser was criminal, how can all 3 of our midfielders possibly be caught ahead of the ball at that stage of the game? The winner wasn’t much better- all started with Cole’s daft quick throw to nobody, O’Hara easy beat at the touchline and I don’t think Tait or Gillespie really cover themselves in glory at the back post either. 

Overall, I think we’ll be absolutely fine this season. However if we have aspirations for anything other than another 7/8th place finish, we really need to stop being so naive and shipping so many soft, avoidable goals. 

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It's not a massive cause for concern yet but is there a slight tendency to lose the head in this team?  Yesterday we were 1-0 up in the 75th minute and by full time we'd conceded twice, had a man sent off and had lost our shape entirely. Even at Tynecastle last week, we were absolutley pummelling Hearts and should have been out of sight but conceded soft goals twice and ended up clinging on.  Celtic were ridiculously clinical at FP but we were well in the game until we conceded a 3rd, 4th and 5th in the space of half an hour. Individually and collectively our defence has been pretty decent imo but that's a few times now where the whole team has lost the plot and been punished for it.

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56 minutes ago, YassinMoutaouakil said:

It's not a massive cause for concern yet but is there a slight tendency to lose the head in this team?  Yesterday we were 1-0 up in the 75th minute and by full time we'd conceded twice, had a man sent off and had lost our shape entirely. Even at Tynecastle last week, we were absolutley pummelling Hearts and should have been out of sight but conceded soft goals twice and ended up clinging on.  Celtic were ridiculously clinical at FP but we were well in the game until we conceded a 3rd, 4th and 5th in the space of half an hour. Individually and collectively our defence has been pretty decent imo but that's a few times now where the whole team has lost the plot and been punished for it.

I think this is the game management side of things that Robinson and Maurice Ross (after the reserves drew 2-2 from 2-0 up) have mentioned in the last week. I think it's a big positive that the management team are identifying this as an issue, with having a squad of players who maybe don't have that much experience and/or are a bit raw, they'll be learning every week - hopefully yesterday was a lesson that we'll learn from going forward. 

Edit - I agree with the point on the defence too, I think that probably added to the frustration yesterday that both goals we lost were poor from our perspective. 

Edited by AndyRoss
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1 hour ago, YassinMoutaouakil said:

It's not a massive cause for concern yet but is there a slight tendency to lose the head in this team?  Yesterday we were 1-0 up in the 75th minute and by full time we'd conceded twice, had a man sent off and had lost our shape entirely. Even at Tynecastle last week, we were absolutley pummelling Hearts and should have been out of sight but conceded soft goals twice and ended up clinging on.  Celtic were ridiculously clinical at FP but we were well in the game until we conceded a 3rd, 4th and 5th in the space of half an hour. Individually and collectively our defence has been pretty decent imo but that's a few times now where the whole team has lost the plot and been punished for it.

I think that's absolutely fair comment.

As @AndyRoss says above that's where the game management side of things comes into it. I think the argument that the team itself is still gelling and are finding their feet stands (to a degree). It may be that given the turnover of players we've been prioritising attacking shape and transitions IDK but we definitely feel a lot more open than Robinson v1.0 that broke the clean sheet record.

Talking specifically about the Hearts game and yesterday we seemed to get thrown when they made tactical changes. At Tynecastle Hearts chucked Meshino on and he started getting a grip of things and yesterday County subbed Graham on and went with a freakshow forward line with him and Stewart and we didn't really adapt to the changes.

I know Robinson was talking about the quick throw in we had before County's 2nd and the naivety of just slinging it into the box but even then, the ball went out for a thrown on the POD side, it was worked back over and their build up came on the East stand side there was plenty time to re-set following our throw.

This is a smashing website for stats and what not. There's a tab that breaks down when our goals are being scored/conceded. It's early days obviously but as it stands 7 of the 10 goals we've conceded have been in the last half hour of matches (and 4 in the last 15 mins), obviously the Celtic game stands as an outlier of sorts but it's still...interesting?

579676252_ScreenShot2019-09-22at17_57_23.png.6fefa387d6c406ca5386f7c559e10663.png

Edited by capt_oats
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I don't think we've ever been a particularly streetwise team - going back a long way. I think despite bags of potential, the current team is as raw as any we've had for a while and we saw that at Tynecastle (despite the excellent overall performance) and we saw it yesterday.

I found it interesting yesterday that we seemed to up the attacking play when we went a goal up in a tight game, when most of our opponents in the league would have done exactly the opposite and tried to shitfest their way to a win.  We should actually have been in a good place to hit county on the break as they opened up - but that never seemed to happen...

Hopefully, yesterday was the type of learning experience/kick in the baws that makes it less likely to happen again.

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This 100% isn't a dig but I'm not really sure the "inexperience" argument washes that well.

Certainly it's fair to say that as a team they've not played together much. Yes, if you look at the squad with Scott, Campbell, Maguire, Turnbull and Semple plus Seedorf who are all 21 or under and 14 of the 23 First Team are under 25 so it's reasonable to say it's a "young" squad but equally Allan Campbell's almost hit 100 games.

Here are the ages and career appearances (including non-league) for the XI that were on the park when County equalised:

Gillespie (27) - 245 games
Grimshaw (24) - 101
Gallagher (28) - 302
Hartley (31) - 396
Carroll (28) - 261
Donnelly (23) - 103
Campbell (21) - 93
O'Hara (23) - 203
Scott (19) - 25
Cole (24) - 185
Hylton (26) - 137

Avg age = 24.9
Total apps = 2051 games

Others who featured:
Polworth (24) - 220
Seedorf (21) - 30
Tait (29) - 443

I mean it's all relative I suppose. When Robinson took over he had a team with Hammell, McManus, Lasley, McDonald and McFadden still on the books along with Samson.

Again, this isn't a criticism but is interesting to me is that looking at that XI is that barring Hartley and Gallagher there aren't really any obvious b*****ds in that XI.

Edited by capt_oats
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