MJC

I suspect Kelly being ‘club captain’ and the ‘Scotland internationalist’ had something to do with that.

Spittal and Kelly on the Hearts and Rangers benches respectively today.

Fuck them.

The reality is that we have done absolutely nothing wrong and so a replay would be an unfair and downright outrageous outcome for us to have to pay the price for Scottish football incompetence. But nothing would surprise me.

The thought of having to sit through that turgid shite all over again with no doubt the same outcome or worse…suffering f**k

Not just because we didn’t beat Partick Thistle yesterday, but because in the eighteen months he’s been in charge we have done nothing but regress under his management and I have seen nothing in these group games so far to suggest there is any improvement on the horizon, the opposite if anything. His tactical set up and approach to games is all wrong and his transfer dealings have been dreadful, regardless of ‘limited budget’ and all that guff.

1-1 with a late equaliser to get us a point we scarcely deserve after County miss some guilt edged chances and we create next to nothing for 80 minutes with our lone striker completely isolated again.

Exactly. He is 33 years old and his best spell in his career was with us. He hasn’t come close to replicating that since he left us, either at Groningen or Killie. We definitely got the best out of him when he was here but that’s past now. Re-signing him would be akin to signing McFadden for the third time in 2015.

van Veen wouldn’t work in Kettlewell’s current set up. There’s no Spittal anymore to support him so he’d be completely isolated upfront. Besides that he has had his purple patch with us and peaked. We wouldn’t get the same van Veen back as the one that we last had in May ‘23.

The last minute levellers against County, Dundee and St.Johnstone along with coming back from 0-2 down in Perth early November kept him in a job last year. And to his and the teams credit those results showed that they had a bit of spirit about them to come back and get those draws. But we appear to be a team set up not to concede a goal rather than score one ourselves and then when we do concede we are more effective when chasing games as opposed to scoring first and defending a lead. That’s no use in the league we play in and it’s not going to get us anywhere in Cup ties.

A drab draw was the right result today between two mediocre teams. We are no better or stronger than we were at any point last season, if anything it’s the opposite as I said earlier. There is nothing to indicate that we are going to have anything other than a turgid, eye-bleedingly poor season again this year, but this time we might not be so fortunate to scrape so many points with last minute equalisers.

The proper football? Today was a League Cup tie, that is proper football. It wasn’t a pre-season friendly it was a match in a major tournament. And in that match we struggled to a 0-0 draw against a Championship side and created very little before losing a penalty shootout. Alarm bells are ringing loud and clear ahead of the start of the league season for me. And SK is going to have a full squad to pick from next week? Is he really? Or are the injuries to Slattery, Paton, Nicholson and Seddon going to miraculously clear up between now and next Saturday??

He won’t do. I’m sorry but he just won’t. His tactics, lineups and general attitude is awful. I want to back him but I just can’t because he is taking us nowhere. Time to go. #troll #pantywetter

Yer a troll! Ye couldn’t wait for this opportunity bla, bla bla. On a serious note your concerns are completely valid.

Full time 0-0. Disgraceful stuff.

We are worse than we were this time last year. I defy anyone to say otherwise.

Kettlewell doing his best Steve Clarke impression here today.

Halliday just won’t do I’m afraid. He’s too slow, too old and is basically done. If we are relying on him being a regular going into this season then we have big problems.

Poor, poor stuff so far. We came more into it as the half wore on but we’re lucky not to be behind. Even if we do qualify we will go no further than the last sixteen with this team.

Let’s be clear about this. Anything, ANYTHING less than us being in the draw for the last sixteen after today’s game will be completely and utterly unacceptable and would be a major black mark against the manager and the players. I think the seeded spot is beyond us but we cannot go out of the League Cup at the group stage.

That and ‘trolling’. You know people have no argument or constructive contribution to make to a discussion once they start accusing someone telling it like it is or how they don’t want to hear it of being a troll or knicker twisting/wetting. Concerns about the squad are perfectly valid right now. We have a crucial Cup game tomorrow and the league season begins a week today yet we have lost our two best players from last season, one of which we knew six months ago would be leaving, and failed to replace either. Once again we are riddled with injuries leaving our already shallow pool of players decimated even more. If that makes me a troll or a knicker wetter for thinking and saying that in some peoples eyes then there’s nothing I can do about that, but I prefer to see it as saying things as I see them as opposed to nodding my head like a donkey and and warbling on like a parrot.

We’re almost a parody of ourselves with the amount of injuries we have at any one time.

Not looking good so far. Thistle already 1-0 up and our record in ‘must win games’ doesn’t inspire any optimism.

Lee McCulloch must have been on decent money with us too, especially as we knocked back a reported bid of £1M from Hearts in late 99. It’s scary looking back at the money we were throwing about at that time and in reality we got very little in return for it.

Possibly I don’t know but that’s beside the point. I just didn’t rate him as a player and his fondness of a night out and his ability to get the womenfolk of Motherwell falling at his feet bought him a lot of leeway.