Ya Bezzer!

Obviously I'd love to see us win and I think getting them at home on the first day of the season gives us a better chance but this will be a massive step up. What I'd like to see is a good professional attitude. Go out and compete. If that gets you a result - great. However I think every lower league team we've played so far has either scored or had real opportunities to score and against Rangers that's going to present a much bigger problem. Our League Cup matches were a bit up and down, finishing on a high but this is a different type of test. It'll be interesting to see how we stand up to it.

Well it's more than just MJC. That's why there is so much pressure on managers to win over developmental coaching. Fans and the media play a big part in how football is played in this country. But I also think it's especially acute at Motherwell since we have this 39 year run in the top league. Relegation is seen as being catastrophic, even being in the running for relegation, when for most other clubs, our size and much bigger, it's something they've been through multiple times.

Wasn't Bair main attribute using his pace and strength to run in behind, chasing long balls? Maybe a passing midfield isn't what he'd prosper off. BTW I think we are still a bit away from having a 'passing midfield'.

HIs physical attributes mean he can do well in our league. He's not a footballer though, he's a unit, so stepping up to a Top 5 league always seemed a long shot. There are different levels in the game and ours is fairly low down the ladder.

And yet top European coaches came to Largs to learn from us. There are so many factors that determine national styles of football. Just for a start we are probably one of the most northerly leagues in the world that play through the winter. That alone is going to encourage a faster, more direct style of football. It wasn't that long ago we were playing on mud piles that made possession football very difficult to impossible. And I guarantee you if Rangers pump us in a couple of weeks all the positivity on style of play will go right out the window in the typical Scottish fan style and we'll 'need' to win the next match or it will be a 'disaster'.

Obviously the best performance of the group stages, kept our tempo high for the 90 minutes which you can probably put down to improving fitness. Overall, although we were better tonight, I thought all the same issues as we'd see before where still there. Thought there was a few stray passes, kinda struggled to create chances and our final ball needed to be better. And although we weren't put under loads of pressure I still thought Morton should have scored twice in the first half. Still it was a step forward and Maswanhise's second was our first great goal of the season. Lots of work on and improve on but there was signs there that we are going forward.

I've probably said this a thousand times so excuse me but Slattery cannot play as a general midfielder. He could potentially be effective as an attacking midfielder, maybe in a 3-4-1-2 or something like that. But if you are putting him a four across the middle just no.

I think that just shows the decline in our top level. There used to be cup shocks. Now there aren't really because lower league clubs beat top level clubs all the time in both cup competitions. Non league clubs have beaten Top 5 clubs on multiple occasions in recent years. Our game at the top level has gone into massive decline, and no offense, but you are old enough to know that. 😆

That second half man. Painful. I'm not even going to say much about that match because there isn't a whole lot to say. But if you take the three matches as a whole we've probably been OK in 2 halves out of 6 and less than OK in 4 halves out of 6 and this against League 1 and League 2 sides. And pretty much across the board our final touch has been dreadful. Passing, shooting, crossing, chance creating it''s all been pretty woeful. And there is a whiff of defensive vulnerability even when we aren't under a lot of pressure. We are still very early in the season, and very early in Askou's tenure. But that team has a lot of improving to do in the next couple of weeks when we step up a level against Morton and Rangers.

When he came on he raised our tempo x 2. At the sluggish pace we were playing before he came on we probably had another penalty shoot out on our hands.

Fadinger

You'll probably know that I'm not Slattery's biggest fan but he came back last season and was pretty good. These two games this season, garbage. Watt wasn't very good either and when you add that to our central defensive issues that's a big hole right down the middle of the pitch. Plus there is the centre forward position, again didn't see anything convincing from the guys that played there tonight. You aren't going to do anything at any level of football unless you sort out the spine of the team. There were occasional good spells of forward play, the two goal scorers did well. Maswanhise when he came on. But there was also fairly long spells when we looked disconnected, slack play, poor passing, poor delivery, poor set plays, laboured movement and tempo. It was all about winning tonight but unless performances improve we are going to come a cropper in one of these matches and if we play like this against Rangers it's going to be a very bad start to the season. Two games in, now we need to see better play.

I see Peterhead have signed Niall McGinn. He must be some age!

Cosgrove was terrible at Aberdeen and then went on a mad run of good form out of nowhere. Honestly, you'd have to imagine that it was a one off since there has been little sign of him repeating it.

There was a time when we could bring in players from the English Championship or good level players from Rangers and Celtic. Those days are gone. That makes finding a strong spine much harder than it used to be and the likleyhood is any good player brought in is leaving after a season. If we'd kept all our good players over say, the last five seasons, we'd have a pretty good team. But the financial reality in 2025 is it's very, very difficult for a club our size to build a side that's got any quality.