crazylegsjoe_mfc

A lot of valid points here. If I remember correctly, Max signed pro with us in the summer of 2020, making his debut in February 2021. I'm not sure if he signed a three-year deal with us then, or signed extensions along the way, but you would think that we had learned our lesson from Jake Hastie and David Turnbull, who both made their breakthroughs to the first team with less than a year left on their deals. If you are sending someone out on loan for our benefit, surely you make sure they're signed up longer than their loan term before doing so. Going from Cove Rangers to Sturm Graz in 6 months without a transfer fee, is a definite bad look for the club. Would he have signed a three-year deal put in front of him before going out on loan? Quite possibly. I would say that Alexander probably takes a good portion of the blame too. He was trying his best to force SOD out the club by running with McGinn as first choice and Johnston as second, but obviously didn't get to hang around to see that through. Although you do also wonder if Johnston would be at Sturm Graz now if he had come into Alexander's system and not been allowed out of his own half. I imagine Hammell was trying to create room in the squad for his own additions and only sent Johnston out on loan because he had a surplus in that position and he would have been the easiest to loan out. The comparison with Robinson / Kettlewell and Hastie & Turnbull / Miller is interesting. For Hastie, I think Elliott Frear getting injured in the Ross County cup game is a sliding doors moment for his bank account. For Turnbull, there's probably a convincing argument both ways. If he comes into the first team and scores 15 in his first season, you could argue he's been exposed to the first team at the right time. On the other hand, some might argue that if he's come into the first team and scored 15 goals he should have been in it sooner. That said, him being a regular the season before, fighting with Rose and McHugh for second balls probably wouldn't have been a worthwhile introduction. As you say, the demographic has massively changed, we don't get the luxury these days of a player of Turnbull's ilk becoming a regular at 19. Players getting snapped up before then plays a part, but I still think to an extent, the lack of anyone 18 - 21 on our fringes is still playing catchup from COVID. Lennon Miller has already played an abnormal amount of football for a player of his age. A number of factors come into that - the new demographic of the youth team, the fact he is a sellable asset and also the fact that he just looks ready - he's got a build and maturity beyond his years. I think if we weren't against the clock to get a transfer fee for him, we might use him slightly more sparingly for the sake of his development, but the club needs to look after itself. To compare the two, my gut instinct would be that Robinson would have used Miller at 16 / 17 in the environment he had to work with, a lot more sparingly. However, I would also say that Kettlewell, in the environment he is working with, would have used Turnbull at 16 / 17 a lot more sparingly, if at all yet. I think Miller's physical readiness plays a massive part in how prominent he has been.

Perhaps. You almost think he couldn't not rate him, but the example I always use in this case is that the last man to get Scotland to a World Cup rated East Fife's Jonathan Page higher than Millwall's Shaun Hutchinson.

To be honest, I think Hammell was just a broken man by then and answered the question in the manner that he thought would get him least grief.

Van Veen was absolutely outrageous towards the end of last season and as a result, rightly deserves to be mentioned up there with our best strikers of recent times. I do think us parting ways this summer was a good thing though, him getting a good contract and us getting a good fee for him at 32. He was never going to recreate last season - his league tally was 2.5x his best ever in the lower leagues in England. Like Van Veen, the Moult thing has been done to death. Hindsight is obviously a wonderful thing and you can look back and say he would have been a better option than Obika, Shaw and Wilkinson - but aside from a spell in the autumn, goals from our strikers haven't really been a problem. I'd have welcomed him back more if he was good in the middle of a back three.

I know some of our January signings haven't contributed much - Elliot, Montgomery and the lad from Sheff Utd for very varying reasons - but our squad on a whole has looked much stronger since the window. Some people were advocating us blowing most, if not all of the budget on Van Veen and continuing with our bench from the Alloa game of Barry Maguire and a bunch of weans. I'm very glad we didn't. I'd probably say in our current financial model, there are very few, if any players I would push the boat out for. That said, it's funny how Kilmarnock did splash out on him, yet his anonymity hasn't really affected them adversely. It's almost like they just signed him to stop St. Mirren getting him.

Apologies, my comment about St. Johnstone being raging re Bair was meant to be flippant and jovial, I didn't mean to open such a conversation up to this extent I've been fairly vocal in my support of Kettlewell on here despite many times I've despaired of him but there's a cynic in me that thinks Bair's success has been a bit of a fortunate accident. I think he signed seemingly as 4th choice in a squad built for 3-5-2, then the other three get injured and we are forced to play 3-4-2-1 with him up top, then the other three get fit again and push him back down the pecking order, before he gets back in the team just as Wilkinson agrees his move away and scores twice. Then our talisman in Mika gets recalled and we struggle in our pursuit of a striker in January and all of a sudden we are full circle with 3-4-2-1 with Bair our option up top himself. I mean, I'm not going to worry too much about how we got here now that we have, but I seriously do wonder if him starting every week was ever the plan. To answer @RandomGuy.'s question, the support definitely has been a big part of Bair's success. I think it's been a bit of a chain reaction. Since he has been firing, Ketts has brought Gent and Davor in and largely started putting round pegs in round holes. This has meant Spittal hasn't needed to play as a wing-back, or deeper in midfield. Losing Wilkinson and Mika and struggling to replace them has meant there are less attacking combinations for Ketts to tie himself in knots with. All of this has led to consistency in selection (a key factor in any success, IMO) which has seen not only Bair, but Spittal's season properly take off.

Raging perhaps the wrong word - perhaps defensive would be better. In terms of the media, I've never before seen an article like Eric Nicholson's recent offering about a particular player.

I'm delighted at how well Bair has done this season. I'm delighted at how raging St. Johnstone fans and media are about it. But it would be madness not to take 750k + add-ons for him if that is accurate.

I imagine it must have been Grezzaball of the season before. Last season Van Been had a few of his own, plus we scored hunners of free kicks. Edit: just realised my typo there but leaving it there because it sounds like the version that Killie got.

I think the "one in, one out" nature of our recruitment last summer, along with the number of CBs he inherited probably cut him some slack. I also think that if, last summer, had you offered us Casey signing a contract extension, or a new centre half, that most of us would have opted for the former. However, I'd say given we ended the year with Casey and Blaney injured, McGinn playing in the mask, Butcher looking like a pale reflection of himself between his many injuries and Mugabi somehow still getting hooked at half time during this injury crisis - not to mention the goals against column, he definitely should've entered the market for one in January. I think the last centre back we had that was consistent over a whole season was Gallagher in 19/20 (a cut short season at that and let's not mention the following one ).

I appreciate there's far more context behind this, but it's amusing that this defence, the main contributor to us having spent a lot of the season battling for safety, is still on course to concede fewer goals than Grezza's team that got to Europe two years ago - having already scored more goals.

Lots of good points made about the defence. I would stick with the current back three for the rest of the season if possible. Probably as it'll be good to have more data on McGinn playing in the middle (on the assumption he's staying) and Blaney building up a run of games. The jury is still out on Blaney for me and I think it would be good to see as much as possible before deciding if he's a starter, a squad player or someone we'd try to move on in the summer. I think we've got the measure of just about everyone else. I actually wonder if at one point the plan was for him to be a starter all season. I wonder if we re-signed Casey because it was Casey, rather than because we wanted a centre back. Would Blaney have been first choice? Would we still have punted Lamie? Who knows, but Blaney playing 90 mins in 3 of 4 group League Cup games definitely suggests to me we planned to use him more than we initially did. Particularly as we kept clean sheets in all of the games he played. I don't know if he also got unlucky that there was a blanket decision that Casey couldn't play in the middle after the Queen's Park game, which in order to accommodate Casey in the starting XI saw him sacrificed for Bevis. Funnily enough that's now the back three we are playing personnel wise, but it took an injury crisis for Kettlewell to consider McGinn an option in the middle. In terms of Casey, there's no doubt he's had more blips than he did last season and his lack of pre season counted against him, but I think there's been an overreaction at times to his form this season and actually he is a good player. I'm fairly hopefully that next season, with a pre season behind him, he'll be able to find a bit more consistency.

Crawford's appearance against Airdrie in the league cup the following summer saw him narrowly miss out on a place in the elite club of Motherwell players who never played in front of fans. The members: Aaron Chapman, Jordan Archer, Tyler Magloire, Sam Foley, Harry Robinson, Callum Lang, Jordan White, Harry Smith. Perhaps Lang aside, a very forgettable bunch.

I remember giving Grezza a fair bit of credit for shitfesting our way to safety easily when the likes of Maguire and Crawford made up two of his midfield three. It was the next season that it sadly dawned on me that it was actually his chosen style of play.

The most memorable thing about Barry Maguire for me is how unmemorable most of his appearances were - rarely see anything good or bad from him. Him taking corners also did annoy me - if you are 6ft+ and you are taking corners you need to be class at them, IMO. He wasn't.