MJC

Boom! That’s how you take a penalty.

Kelly starts, SO’D drops out and Devine comes in. Halliday out, injured presumably and Vale starts.

“And here is the Motherwell line up for this evening’s match at Pittodrie… Number 1 - the Captain - Liam Kelly Number 2 - Stephen O’Donnell………”

Great post and you’ve worded that a lot better than I could have. You are wrong though to feel that all we exist for is to keep finances in balance. We all know what we exist to do.

The whole club is stagnant and directionless and there is a great deal apathy surrounding everything just now and that’s been the case for a good few years now. As a club we have zero ambition and a gutless yellow streak which results in our dismal cup performances, in my opinion. The other night was no surprise whatsoever, just like Raith Rovers a year ago today wasn’t either. And let me be clear here. I am not expecting us to win Cup competitions but i would prefer it if we didn’t whimper out early the minute we are paired with a fellow top flight side or mid to high table Championship team as we do all too often. Basically the extent of our ‘ambition’ these days appears to be to be less shite than the shitfest two teams in the division and hope we can avoid relegation, anything else is a bonus. We are always skint, as the club constantly ram down our throats the product on the park reflects this. I don’t know what the plan is. I don’t even know if there is anyone in place to put a long term plan in place but it just feels like we trundle along until the year we are eventually relegated, and when that happens we will almost certainly be looking at part time football. Sad times.

It’s a bit quick to be dismissing him like that, but, van Veen is a confidence player and as we’ve seen during his time with us when he is in the mood and his head is up then he can deliver big time. On the other hand we also know that he can be quite huffy and moody when things aren’t coming off for him. I genuinely think we got the best of him last season and he will struggle to replicate anything like that form again. Don’t get me wrong, he would be an improvement on our current striker options but he wouldn’t be the KvV that scored in eleven games in a row that we got from February til May last year.

Stuart McCall being in the opposition dugout played a big part in us getting through the playoff too imo. A bigger bottle merchant in managing one off games you’ll struggle to find. Baraclough being an ‘outsider’ helped us greatly too.

Exactly. We don’t owe Kelly or the National team anything. We need to do what is best for us as a club, not put ourselves at a disadvantage to help Scotland and our underperforming goalkeeper.

Was the Queens Park game in the League Cup group stages not live on Viaplay?

1-1

Depends how you look at it. Personally I think the bigger picture is that we've won two league games in twenty and have now been knocked out of the Cup by a lower league side. I don't care about any other side or their managers, our form is dreadful.

They went after lower league cup defeats came at the end of horrific runs of form for both of them. And Tuesday night apart our form under Kettlewell has been dismal.

Null vote. A shower of gutless shitebags led by a clueless manager.

It was always going to be a tough tie, yet we were as weak as piss throughout and were outbattled as we so often do in Cup ties. It’s just so infuriatingly predictable.

Two mistakes? There wasn’t a success in that entire team or performance tonight. It’s all well and good saying “move onto the league” but the Cup gives us our only opportunity of potentially achieving something in the game. Or at the very least giving the club and the support something of a lift and a reason to look forward. But yet again we fail miserably early on in the competition against a lower league side for the second year running. Its not acceptable.

Who cares? They’re in it, we’re not. Two years on the trot being knocked out by Championship sides at this stage of the Scottish Cup. It’s just not good enough.

Too little, too late.

As I said the other day, lose this and the pressure is back on him. And it is, deservedly so. A 5-0 win against a Ross County side about to sack Adams does nothing but paper over the cracks. That goes deeper than the manager I’m afraid. We as a club just don’t have the mentality for cup runs and results like tonight, Raith last year, Inverness, St.Mirren when they were in the lower leagues are just shrugged off. We are a losing club.

Another major black mark in his book tonight.

And as ever we failed.

How many times has that been said over the years? We would honestly be better just opting out of Cup ties because we are fucking hopeless at them.

Disgusted but not surprised.

We've been outbattled all night. As much as hindsight is pointless we would have been better with Holliday (70% fit or not) in midfield tonight.

We had won once in almost twenty league games and only scraped past Alloa in the last round before Tuesday night. That so many seemed to think that we had “turned a corner” after scudding a rank rotten Ross County side who had chucked it for their manager was baffling. Big, big wake up call for those folk this, or at least it should be.