Motherwell FC - A Thread For All Seasons

[Casagolda]

To me it had shades of the cup game at Ibrox a few years ago- despite not being at our best we twice found ourselves in a good position and twice conspired to throw it away. 

I’ve just brought myself to watch back the ‘highlights’(how little effort are they putting into them these days btw?) and our defending for the first 3 goals last night was amateur level stuff. 

Last year under Robinson I genuinely think we might have gotten through that, however this season we appear to have a soft centre and struggle to absorb pressure without the physical presence of Kipre and Dunne at the back.

Which begs the question why we’re persisting with the back 3 as it doesn’t seem to suit Aldred/Hartley and Cadden/Tait haven’t exactly been thriving in the wing back roles either. We can’t keep a clean sheet to save ourselves at the minute and our attacking play is laboured and fairly predictable- so who is the formation actually getting the best out of? 

Still, some Golazo by big Bowman - absolutely outrageous strike that was worth the £18 alone. 

 

Edited September 27, 2018 by Casagolda

[welldaft]

I actually thought Hearts were by some distance the better side in the 2nd half and deserved the win. 

But I agree that with Kipre, Dunne, Rose and throw in a Moult along the way, we would have been in with a real chance of progressing whereas this season we are no longer a surprise package. 

To me the match turned in Hearts favour with Bigi monumental f**k up. For our players that have fought so hard to get and stay in front you can almost understand the deflating effect such a balls up has. I am still raging. There is a decent player in there but he is not set up for a battle and that is what we are up against most weeks. He will probably play well v a good Killie side. 

We have come along way in the cups when we are disappointed at a quarter final exit to the leagues top side away from home.....

As for Bowman. I have been a critic of his in that he does not score enough. But kudos to him - a fantastic strike. Hopefully give him a confidence boost for games coming up. 

[YassinMoutaouakil]

I think you could tell immediately after how much of a boost it gave Bowman. He was trying wee flicks and knockdowns that I've never seen him attempt before.

[des dad]

8 hours ago, Insert Amusing Pseudonym said:

Never a fucking penalty though

 

I think if you check you're morning paper you'll find it was a penalty.

[capt_oats]

5 hours ago, Casagolda said:

I’ve just brought myself to watch back the ‘highlights’(how little effort are they putting into them these days btw?) and our defending for the first 3 goals last night was amateur level stuff. 

It's definitely changed in terms of content from last season. However, I wonder if there's a correlation between the "highlights" being scaled back and the MFC TV platform roll-out.

After teething problems with the subscription service when it launched I logged in to my account earlier this afternoon and the full 90 mins from last night is available to view. It wouldn't be a massive shock if free to air stuff is limited to the goals and the "Story of the match" as a result.

[Dindeleux]

Really hope you chaps aren't getting any funny ideas about Saturday, although I'm gettingconcerned that Motherwell are edging into the territory of "underperforming side in need of a result"...
That never particularly augers well for us.

You seem be be forgetting who our manager is.

[dezz]

I was having a chat with a mate last night about our transfer strategy and Cedric Kipre’s positive start to life at Wigan.

Whilst it can’t be argued that we’ve done some excellent business recently with Kipre, Moult, Heneghan and Johnson all bringing in good transfer fees, it dawned on me that we could really be doing with one of these guys making a success of it in the Championship, as it appears Cedric is doing, not only so we benefit from future income from sell on’s but to ensure that teams from Championship/League One still see Motherwell (and the Scottish Premiership) as a place to spend some money.

It’s fair to say that Moult hasn’t exactly set the heather alight at Preston, Heneghan played once for Sheff Utd before being sent out on loan and whilst Johnson got a big money move to Boro, he hasn’t really featured for them.

John McGinn seems to have started very well at Villa but I can’t think of too many others off the top of my head that have gone down south recently and made a success of it.

Do you think the relative ‘failure’ of players from Scotland could see clubs at that level become more reluctant to spend money up here?

[welldaft]

No is my response. You also forgot to mention Andy Robertson. One of Scotland’s biggest successes / exports recently. 

Players playing well in the Scottish top flight will always be a target for English clubs. The key reason is they can buy them for a heck of a lot less than were equivalent players playing down south. I accept McGinn had only one year left on his contract, but players bought by Premiership clubs from Championship clubs were routinely being sold for £5-15m. 

 

[MJC]

Our summer of poor transfer dealings have more than caught up with us and we are firmly in a relegation battle. I like Robinson, but time is running out for him imo and sadly I can't see him turning it around as that would require a drastic change in how we play, and I'm not convinced he is capable of that.

[Gianfranco]

Based on what I’ve seen this season so far, I’d agree with MJC to an extent that us, Hamilton, st Mirren and Dundee will be the bottom 4 teams. Although it probably will be a bit of a scrap I think we’ll still get out of it ok.

[YassinMoutaouakil]

I think the general idea behind what Robinson is trying to do is fair enough in theory. Where he's failing right now is the execution. If your entire gameplan is built around physicality and defensive solidity then, as a premise, things begin to fall apart if you start chucking in 7 goals in a week like we are. It's also becoming clear that we made a massive cockup of the summer window. It seemed pretty obvious to everyone not named A.Burrows or S.Robinson that the cup money presented an opportunity to push the boat out for a few acquisitions of real quality, supplemented by young players. Instead, this whole 12-18 farce has left us with the worst of both worlds, and shedloads of new signings who are nowhere near the quality required to trouble the starting eleven but are blocking the path from the u20s. As of right now, Donnolly, Gorrin, Grimshaw and Sammon all look like entirely pointless signings/re-signings. We could have not signed any of them and it would have literally no effect on our season so far.

I do think Robinson should be allowed to have one bad window without immediately getting bulleted, there are extenuating circumstances and lessons to be learnt. We struck gold by unearthing Kipre, so it was obviously massively unlikely we'd be able to replace him like for like. Our three starting defenders atm are all decent centrebacks for this level, but they're far too similar and none have Cedric's physical presence or technical ability. This problem has been exacerbated by Dunne's injury. You'd hope in future we'd have more of a contingency plan when selling a saleable asset than re-signng Tom Aldred despite having two extremely similar players already on the books.

Punting Maclean without bringing in another attacking midfielder or wide player was an inexcusable lapse in judgment given Tanner's issues. We literally have no offensive options off the bench other than bringing Frear on or chucking all our strikers on at once and ceding midfield. Since we seem hellbent on giving teams a 2 goal head start every week it's fucking criminal that we don't have anyone capable of changing a game. We've somehow reached the stage where I miss Demi Petravicius just for the sheer novelty of seeing someone other than Elliott Frear warming up at the 60 minute mark.

We'll probably beat Livi next week and I doubt we'll ever face a serious relegation threat under Robinson but there's already a growing list of things needing rectified next summer.

[Killiefan]

Do you guys practice in training how high you can kick the ball?

['WellDel]

1 hour ago, Killiefan said:

Do you guys practice in training how high you can kick the ball?

30 ft up in the air is the only safe place for us to put the ball these days. 

If it's on the ground it's more often than not going to end up in our net. 

[Ron Aldo]

This might seem a bit simplistic but how did Killie get Greg Stewart and we ended up with Sammon?

Their budget isn't that much bigger than ours surely? Stewart would have offered us something different whereas Sammon is Curtis Main's da as far as I can tell.

[Casagolda]

12 hours ago, YassinMoutaouakil said:

We'll probably beat Livi next week and I doubt we'll ever face a serious relegation threat under Robinson but there's already a growing list of things needing rectified next summer.

Agree with most of what you say but I don’t share your confidence on this part.

Listening to his post match interview phrases like ‘work even harder’ and ‘worry about the quality later’ sent alarm bells ringing for me. 

Was curious about when he said ‘I’ve been very loyal to people, now it’s time to make a change’. Very reminiscent of his interview in the midst of our December slump.

Who do we reckon that is then? By my reckoning Carson, Tait, McHugh, Aldred and Main are the only ones who haven’t been benched at some point this season.   

I mean given the way he basically tore strips of Bigi despite not actually naming him, not the first time he’s done that to Bigi post match either, he’s clearly one who’s getting dropped next week but I wouldn’t say Robinson’s been particularly loyal to him.

[YassinMoutaouakil]

51 minutes ago, Casagolda said:

Agree with most of what you say but I don’t share your confidence on this part.

Listening to his post match interview phrases like ‘work even harder’ and ‘worry about the quality later’ sent alarm bells ringing for me. 

 

Possibly misplaced optimism but I do think under Robinson we'll have enough about us to shitfest points off the rest of the bottom six when we have to. Livi are obviously on the crest of wave atm but I'd expect other sides to figure them out at some point(not unlike us last season) and they'll surely revert to the mean eventually. Fair play to them though because they're playing well above themselves right now.

Dundee and St Mirren have very poor sides for this level and Accies will always end up down there. You'd hope we have enough about us to end up clear of that dogfight, but like you say, Robinson's attitude certainly isn't inspiring much hope right now. 

[capt_oats]

I've said before that I get what Robinson was trying to do with the 12-18 chat but the fact he talked it up and given it a "name" and tried to sell it as a strategy means he's made a rod for his own back. He could easily have said that he was happy enough with the squad that reached 2 cup finals and he was simply replacing the players who were released since that is essentially what's happened. Rightly or wrongly it feels like we've thrown our investment into rewarding the players who had their relative success last season.

Seeing as we extended the contracts of Dunne, Tait, Bowman, Rose, Grimshaw and Kipré (along with George Newell on the quiet) then the upshot is that presumably our recruitment budget really only extended to the saving we were making from the half dozen or so players who were either released or returned to their parent clubs so that would be Griffiths, Plummer, Petravicius, Hendrie, Ciftci and the now returned Aldred. It then becomes a question of how much the quality we could have signed would have cost and what sort of room we had in our budget.

Presumably he's looked at things and thought that with the budget that we've got we can't necessarily upgrade on our best first team players. If, as reported, St. Johnstone have been chucking six figure salaries at players like Tony Watt then I see why he went the route he did. In the same way as we can't afford to go out and spend cash to replace the £1m version of Kipré or the £500k Rangers LC bodying version of Moult then rightly or wrongly I don't think we'd be able to afford upgrades on Tait, Cadden, Hartley, Campbell et al. Similarly Main was always going to be our first pick #9 which in itself is a problem because he's not the sort of player Moult was for us.

The argument that the best way to strengthen the bench is to upgrade the first team is sound enough but the knock on is that it means you've got guys with first team wages sat on the bench. I imagine that would have been emphasised with the number of times Bigi was sat on the bench last season and it'd be a circumstance we'd be keen to avoid.

Absolutely none of that changes the fact that right now there are clear issues with the squad though. 7 of the starting XI were regular starters last season so it's open for question just how much of the problems are down to recruitment and how much is simply down to form and organisation (or lack of it). It's fine margins and all that but we've literally gone from a side that broke a club record for clean sheets to a side who look like they'll ship goals on a weekly basis.

Either way it's difficult not to look at things as they stand and not feel that bringing in one or two players with a bit of quality would probably have made a difference to us.

It's speculation on my part (obviously) but I can't help but feel that Bigi sticking around has kind of put a spanner in the works for us and left us a bit hamstrung budget-wise. Both the player and the club have gone on record essentially saying they had expected to leave during the summer. I'm almost certain that we brought in Gorrin as a replacement to sit on the bench (as Bigi did for most of last season) and have Turnbull as the other player for that position.

The problem there, aside from the quality of the players he's brought in, is that Robinson's found himself in exactly the same situation with his own squad as he did when he oversaw the mass purge in the summer he took over. He criticised that our first  XI was predictable. It was the same week in, week out.

Well...here we are again.

There are shades of McCall's last season with this summer's policy, for differing reasons I guess. However where that season we signed Ainsworth on a permanent deal following his loan and also Josh Law while retaining the bulk of the squad who finished 2nd save releasing McFadden and Hutchinson moving to Fulham this time round we may have replaced those we moved on with much of a muchness but we haven't really replaced those who were making the #difference to us last season ie: Moult and Kipré. I mean even Sammon is a massive downgrade on Nadir so we're a net loss on our sub striker.

Edited October 1, 2018 by capt_oats

[Desp]

Let's look on the positive side.  With Robinson's tactics, we'll absolutely skoosh the Championship next season. 

[Swello]

17 hours ago, capt_oats said:

it's open for question just how much of the problems are down to recruitment and how much is simply down to form and organisation (or lack of it).

I was away at the weekend and so missed the Killie game (and probably won't be rushing to watch the highlights) - but this is where I left off on Wednesday after the Hearts game. I think our first choice 11 is decent enough on paper - but having been at most games this season, I can't escape the feeling that a lack of fitness and form is hurting us a lot (although not as much as kamikaze mistakes it has to be said).

I think we have too many players struggling for fitness and form at the moment. Hartley and Main have simply looked less than 100% fit since the start of the season (understandably in Hartley's case), Dunne and Tanner are major losses for us - so there are 4 first choice players right away.

On the form front, I feel that Tait has been a long way off last season's form so far - possibly as a result of playing on the left every week. Cadden has been undeniably poor and his confidence has taken a kicking as a result. Most worryingly for me is Alan Campbell - he has been subbed off a lot this season and is not on the form that he showed before - he gives every impression of someone that desperately needs to recharge his batteries but he will be off with the U21's again and won't get that chance despite maybe being our most important player (when he plays well, we tend to get something from the game). Most bizarrely - Carson has not had the greatest of starts and he, far more than Kipre, was the key defensive player last season.

I think there are structural problems with the squad - but to my mind - the "1-11" is a far bigger worry than the "12-18" as those guys mostly replaced last season's duds.

 

[Busta Nut]

Richard Foy joins Busta and Sparra to look back on a difficult week for Motherwell in which they exited the Betfred League Cup at Tynecastle and lost to Kilmarnock in league action. Also on the agenda was a preview of Saturday’s game against Livingston, Motherwell Ladies and the scheduling of the Betfred Cup semi-finals.

 

https://www.mfc1886.com/mfc-podcast-2018-19-episode-12/