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Jens' Death Stare was impressive, I must admit. Even those clueless "journalists" got the message. Ruthlessness is necessary in a manager, as are good man-management and tactical nous. I hope AJ turns out to have both.

I think there was a lot of resistance amongst the dinosaurs of our Scottish football world, who resented an outsider showing that our SPL payers could actually play attractive, attacking, pass-based football beyond traditional Scottish kick-and-rush. It put them to shame basically, so they (e.g. Ian McCall) confected grievances like their pearl-clutching reaction to Askou's comments on Handley or MFC's 140 years of relative failure. Not necessarily a huge fan of M. Stewart but he played straight with us, as did Andy Halliday, who was frozen out instantly by JBA but could see his methods worked and were quite visionary (for Scotland). Hats off to him. Don't know what Alfred will achieve here frankly but he's not JBA so will have to model the team given his resources and in line with his own beliefs. He needs until the window to see if he can improve our performances as he adjusts to our league, one which his predecessor couldn't wait to get away from, and for good reason. He's in a foreign country with a wife and young child so I think he needs some slack cut for him at the moment. Like many MFC fans, I suspect, I'm dismayed but not but not reaching for the malt whisky cabinet yet.

Interesting to read the comments by AJ about Vogt regarding training. Also it would appear that Maswanhise has not been behaving himself in his social life going by some recent social media posts. What we see is a 90 mins snapshot of 3 weeks of training, players living their lives for good or bad, personal/professional issues for individual players, fitness, injury etc, etc. Judging the decisions of the manager on the 90 mins snapshot only is like heading straight into the tip of the iceberg with abandon because you can't see what lies beneath.

I just don't know, but both Falkirk and St Mirren are media darlings so its maybe an unfair comparison?

Yup........tried to be funny........and failed 🤣🤣

An irishman, called English working in Scotland, its all double Dutch to me 🤣

Tom English talks the biggest amount of shite he should stick to rugby.

Yeh, thought it might be a bit too early for him, back soon hopefully! Results with and without him this seasons are pretty stark (European games apart). I think JKL looks more suited to a full back role than JGR, but I suppose time will tell!

I don't think priestman is ready yet pal. Swap JKL and JGR round and that team looks fine

Only got 20 minutes. Game was gone by then, so no real chance to impress.

Came off bench and done ok. I thibk folk forget he's only 20. Needs time but I think could be really good

I am as much for conjecture as the next guy. That's 95% of what football forums are all about. Tell me this thought, if ( and it is an if) we lose at the weekend to go 5 defeats in a row with a lacklustre performance will you know for a fact that it's not because of disquiet in the dressing room? This has all the hallmarks of a David/ Wellfan Rd 2. I better go put the kettle on just incase it turns into an all nighter! Utter nonsense. How dare thee!!

Think we all need a joke? Will I volunteer? OK......I'll take that as a No. 🤣🤣

😆 Love that sketch. It's the politician and his family standing at the gates of their home. Could NEVER make that stuff again. Haha

You’re doing it again. Your attempts to deconstruct my opinions don’t make your own interpretation of the evidence any less subjective, or mine any less valid. Reframing what I said to suit your own narrative doesn’t make your argument any more convincing, either. I’ll continue to call out your verbose word soup for what it is. You talk a good game, though. A bit like Alfred.

I hope that AJ turns things around and we improve as a team, both in respect of performance and results. How will it turn out? Who knows. What I do know though, is that if the length of AJ's reign is threatened by poor results, the fans may well force the board's hand. Thats how football operates for better or for worse.

First off, that post from David is the longest thing I have ever read!!! It was however a good read and made some really good points. Better than some of the analysis you read from the Scottish media pros. I did not read the debate above as policing or particularly confrontational. It made for good reading from two posters who are clearly articulate and give some thought to the game. My only gripe Wellfan is that the conclusion generally comes round all to quickly to the manager being on an inevitable path to the exit door. That apart I think most of us empathise with what you say and share your frustration about the team. You might be right about AJ. I don't think there is one of us that is not concerned by the current direction of travel. We have to all hope however that you have got it wrong. Anyway the debate is a good one on both sides and not just argument for the sake of it.

Won't detain you all for long. Basically, AJ needs until Christmas to organise the squad imho. After that, the board need to re-assess. I hear comments about players not listening to him/"buying into" his instructions. Most of my working life was spent under managers who a) couldn't do my job or b) hadn't done my job, but I still went into work and did my best. I expect them to do their best The club needs to pull together to get us out of our mini-slump, and by "the club" I mean the supporters too.

I think there's a ton of hindsight being presented as objective analysis in this post. The first problem is this idea that under JBA there was a "clear identity from day one", whereas under Johansson we're apparently seeing "absolutely none". Unless my memory isn't what it used to be, Askou's first competitive game was a 2-2 draw with Clyde. We then needed a stoppage-time winner to beat Peterhead at Fir Park. His first FIVE league games were all draws, and we didn't win a league match until the sixth attempt against Aberdeen. After eight league games, Askou had eight points. Johansson currently has eight points after eight league games. Nobody remembers Askou's start that way now because we know what happened afterwards. And during those results and performances, the usual characters were moaning like fuck early doors. I remember talk about us being "basically all fur coat and no knickers, and we’ve so far been unable to show that we can win games" and even the now incredible patter of "It’s still early(ish) days but so far JBA hasn’t shown any evidence of good game management so far." That's why the points comparison matters. It isn't being used to say Johansson will therefore be as successful as Askou. It's illustrating how ridiculously early it is to declare that one manager was clearly building something while another is obviously heading nowhere. And saying there have been "absolutely no signs" of anything under Johansson is just simply isn't true. We've already won away at Hibs, gone through HB 5-0 on aggregate in Europe, eliminated HJK 3-1, produced an excellent 2-0 home performance against them, beaten Dundee United 3-0 and competed very well with a good Freiburg side until a red card and penalty changed that game. We were also unbeaten through our first four league matches. There's absolutely an argument that things have regressed since then. That's completely fair. What you can't reasonably argue is that there has never been any evidence of a functioning team or any indication of what Johansson is trying to build. We've literally already seen it. The other claim I don't understand is that we've become "increasingly clueless the longer Alfred's had the players on the training pitch". At one stage we had played 11 competitive games in 37 days, including European travel. That's recovery sessions, preparation sessions, matches, flights, injuries, rotation and trying to integrate new players. It isn't six uninterrupted weeks at Dalziel Park drilling tactical patterns. Calendar time and coaching time aren't even close to being the same thing. Throw in the ridiculous international break that we just had and you compound the problem even further. We had key players on international duty, and other players were away visiting family and on holiday. That matters when you're asking a manager to change how a team plays. People talk about "identity" as though a manager installs a formation on a tactics board and suddenly eleven players simply just understand it. A possession structure, pressing system or set of attacking rotations involves spacing, body orientation, triggers, passing angles, rest defence, movement off the ball and players reacting automatically to what ten teammates and eleven opponents are doing. Those behaviours take repetition. And sometimes a team actually looks WORSE for periods while learning them because players are consciously thinking about movements that eventually need to become automatic. That obviously can't be used as an excuse indefinitely. If we're still seeing the same structural failures months down the line, then absolutely question the coaching. But eight league games or so is a stupidly small sample from which to conclude that a manager is "incapable" or "too stubborn". If something isn't working, it doesn't follow that the manager either cannot see it or stubbornly refuses to change it. He might believe changing it creates a bigger weakness elsewhere. He might think the execution is wrong rather than the structure. He might be trying to establish rehearsed patterns rather than changing the system every time it produces a poor performance. He might have limitations in the squad. Or, he might simply be wrong. All of those possibilities are there and exist. That's the complexity of management that most of the time gets completely ignored when analysis becomes "I can see this isn't working, therefore the manager can't". as I said in the Celtic thread, identifying a symptom isn't the same as diagnosing its cause. If Hodge is being overrun, is Hodge the problem? Or is the press in front of him being bypassed? Is the defensive line too deep? Is the full-back pinned? Has the opposition created an overload? Are the distances between units wrong? Change Hodge, and you might solve absolutely nothing. Or it might solve everything. That's not saying fans can't criticise. We absolutely can. But there is a huge difference between observing that something isn't working and knowing why it isn't working. There's a reason why we're not in the job, and he is. As I've mentioned elsewhere too, the Rosenborg criticism of Johansson is relevant here to a point. One of the genuine questions I had about him when I saw we'd hired him was about his adaptability. I'm not a fan of Norwegian football by any stretch, but from what I could see, his first Rosenborg team improved enormously, finished fourth after they'd been ninth the previous year and ended 2024 with 10 wins in their last 13 league games. The concern is that when that team later stopped functioning, he struggled to construct the next version of it. That's a legit criticism and something I'd watch closely at Motherwell. But that's very different from deciding after eight league games that he's "out of his depth". And then we get to the strangest part of the post: "A defeat to Killie... will only accelerate what is increasingly starting to feel inevitable." Inevitable? After eight league games? That's not analysis. That's you deciding where the story ends and then interpreting everything that happens through that conclusion. If we'd applied that standard to Askou after eight games, we'd have been looking at a manager with exactly eight league points, one league victory and consecutive defeats to Celtic and Falkirk and asking where this supposed progress was leading us. Fortunately we didn't know the ending at the time. In fact, after skimming the matchday threads from that early period I'm sure that absolutely not one of us would have guessed how it would end in reality. We do now, which makes his early period look much more obviously progressive when looking back than it probably felt while we were actually living through it. AJ might fail. He might prove unable to adapt. The current four-game losing run is concerning, and performances need to improve. No one is debating that. But there is a massive difference between saying that and constructing a narrative where Askou arrived with a fully functioning identity from day one, Alfred has shown absolutely nothing, more training has somehow made us progressively worse, he appears incapable of recognising obvious problems, and his departure is already becoming "inevitable". That's interpretation presented as fact. And less than ten league games into a fairly sizeable change in playing philosophy where AJ is following one of the best managers we've had in decades, I'd rather judge whether the problems are still there after he's actually had a meaningful amount of time to coach them than pretend we already know how the story ends.

AJ has had to totally rebuild the team over the summer, losing players of the quality of Just, Watt and Slattery, with all their goals from midfield, Welsh and McGinn( long term injury) from defence. Add to that Maswhanise having a once in a career (Bair / Higdon )season and the ongoing 1st pick. Players like JK and priestman still out wiith long term injury no wonder we are struggling. It will take time to get a settled team, and all the 1st pick players back available, so why dont we cut AJ some slack. We are no worse off than last season at this stage in this league 3 or 4 wins and its suddenly top 6 etc as we saw last year. Judging and condeming the manager after a 4 game poor run is nonsense, coyw.

He seems to spend a lot of time angrily shouting from the dugout, as plenty of managers do. But as I’ve said before, respect is earned, not demanded.