MJC

If you can’t defend and you can’t score goals then you will lose more than you will win. That is why we haven’t won a league match in 2022 and are out of the Scottish Cup. Yes, having a player red carded inside the first sixty seconds hampered us, but that doesn’t excuse our defending for both goals, our inability to create/score chances and our managers refusal to change things when it was badly needed. Again! On a positive note today Cornelius was superb and Donnelly actually had one of his better games for us in a long while.

Let’s concentrate on next season more like!

We would give them a fair run for their money to be fair. If Hibs were to go four goals up and we pulled it back to take it to ET and penalties we’d only lose the shootout.

Game over.

That was a yellow card at best. Mugabi was daft to go in like that but that is Willie Collum at his pedantic, petty best.

This is it sadly. I like the idea of the Old Firm leaving Scottish football but in reality all it would do is increase the glory hunters. Both of them leaving would not mean they flat pack Parkhead and Ibrox, load them onto lorries and drive down the M74 with all of their core supporters following behind them for them to set up in London or Birmingham or wherever. Their supporters would all still be up here and their popularity would skyrocket. You see kids who support clubs like ours running about in Liverpool/Man Utd/Chelsea tops just now, and if Celtic/Rangers ‘go down south’ and flourish then I have absolutely no doubt that you’ll start to see a lot of non-Old Firm fans up here having one of them as their ‘second team’ or ‘English’ team.

I’m sure that was the case in 2018 when we faced Hearts at this stage in the Cup in a tie that was also on TV. If we get a similar result as that day then I certainly won’t care a jot.

Just saw that, it’s ridiculously tight in the mid table.

St.Mirren have just beaten Dundee with a last minute winner which brings them level on points with us, though we have a better GD.

Who would be our five takers should it get that far? The three obvious names that spring to mind are KvV, O’Hara and Donnelly, though of course the latter two have missed one each in our last two penalty shootout Scottish Cup losses. They are though normally reliable from the spot and van Veen took a good one against Morton so those three would be decent shouts.

There’s shades of 2002/03 about how the Scottish Cup has been our salvation in an otherwise rotten run of league fixtures. We do have a chance and a decent one at that to reach a Semi Final as Hibs themselves are nothing special and are in poor form also, but you just don’t know what Motherwell team will be selected on the day. If we are to win this then we need to score first and we need to win in 90 minutes/ET in my opinion. If it goes to penalties we’re done for.

And that is the answer to the question of the difference between the first half of the season and the second. In the corresponding fixtures of our last two home games from the first half of the season where we beat Dundee 1-0 and Ross County 2-1, Watt scored the winner in both of those games. He also won us a point at both Perth and Easter Road and won the game for us against Dundee Utd at Fir Park. We weren’t great in the first half of the season, certainly not any better than we currently are but the difference between then and now is that we no longer have Watt to bail us out.

Thank God we had Tony Watt from August to December. He dug us out of many holes in that time and helped us paper over many cracks.

Well worked from KvV

O’Donnell

Alan Burrows has tested positive too.

A lot of us thought that about last night! Still, on to the next one. It simply has to be a home win. Won’t be pretty but we’ll scrape it, I hope. 1-0

van Veen starts

Really need a win here and I think we’ll get it. 2-1 in a tight game.

Six points are a must from these next two games. Two home games against sides below us in the league, that’s the type of games we should be winning. And apart from that we need to get our first league win of 2022 on the board.

The comments made at 0-2 and half time were absolutely fair and reasonable going by our first half performance. It looked for all the world like yet another gutless no-show against one of the Old Firm that we’ve seen all to often over the last few years. And it absolutely was in that first half. The second half was a different story. We actually showed a bit of fight, a bit of aggression and we’re rewarded for it. Woolery’s run and assist for the first goal was testament to that and to then go on and get an equaliser showed a huge amount of character from the team. So, if you pardon the cliché, it was a game of two halves.

Kelly by a mile. Some absolutely cracking saves kept us in that otherwise we would have been dead and buried by 30 minutes in.

See when we actually play with a big of aggression and have a go we actually look like a capable side.

I can’t remember the last time I felt so satisfied with a draw. And when did we last play twice at Ibrox in the same season and not lose?

Kelly has been tremendous again for us today. A quality goalkeeper!