Ya Bezzer!

Goodwillie scored 6 goals in 11 starts for Dundee Utd during his loan spell. He wasn't worth the money they were forking out because of the players on much lower wages that they had brought through their youth system but Goodwillie would still be a good player for most teams on ability.

I wouldn't say we've never had a better chance but Celtic have 9 wins on the trot and they have played well in probably 4 of them and scrapped victories in the rest of them. They have not been that convincing at home in particular. Their dominance on paper is greater than it has been out on the field and their 5-0 win at Fir Park wasn't typical of them this season. You suspect their run, which has been on shaky ground for a while now, has to come to an end soon so why shouldn't it be us that does it? Any kind of result would be a great result but we shouldn't go their quaking in our boots because despite what the results and league table says this is a poorer Celtic side than last seasons.

There is a time and a place for every thing but shepherding in itself is no bad thing. If anything I'd rather a defender stayed on his feet that way he doesn't get taken out of the game. Shaun Hutchinson could learn about shepherding instead of making the tackle every time because he often misses and end up 15 yards behind the play. Mark Reynolds was overall a very good player for us although towards the end you felt he was stagnating a little and needed a move away. In a way he was hoist on his own petard by coming into the team as a rookie and being absolutely magnificent. His first season was probably his best season and fans therefore didn't see enough development and perhaps even detected his performances going back slightly but that didn't mean he wasn't good. Central defence is one of the hardest positions to play and depends on match experience more than other areas of the park. Right now Mark Reynolds is only 26 years old and has maybe another 7 or 8 years at the top level in front of him. With additional experience I'd expect him to get better and better. He should be one of the first names down in the Scotland squad, especially since we are not over abundant in central defenders. I don't see him every week now but he has been excellent when we've played Aberdeen and Willie Miller, a genuinely world class defender in his day, absolutely raves about him every week on the radio. No doubt that won't dissuade his critics but I don't see any many other Scottish central defenders at Reynolds level.

Ramsden has been a very good signing. A real steady eddie in a couple of positions. Carswell has been up and down but he's certainly a trier. I got into trouble for my opinion on Steve Jennings a while back but I think Carswell is similar in that he's not a creative player and isn't likely to excite too many scouts or journalists with his technique or vision so he's never going to get the same attention as a Gauld or Mackay-Steven. However ever team needs a player like that in midfield so I don't mean to denigrate him in anyway when I say that. As a regular at the top end of the SPFL I think Carswell should have been called up by the U21's especially when players are in that squad that aren't even close to first team football but at the end of the day it's up to Billy Stark to pick what he thinks is the best team.

My offical worst XI. GK Graeme Smith - So dire he got dropped on multiple occasions for Colin Meldrum. DF Alan Sneddon - Quality mouser, shit player. Came to us very much at the end of his career. DF Karl Ready - A player I don't mind calling a complete scumbag and wage thief. Did I mention he was a scumbag? DF Ange Oueifio - One of those occasions when a park level player somehow finds himself playing professional football. DF Gary Bollan - He's fat, he's round, he's....just fat and round. MF Andy Dow - One of those players I'm actually glad had their contracts ripped up when we went into administration. MF Paul Keegan - As Lady Catherine Lamb almost said "Sad, bad and dangerous to watch." MF Kevin McBride - His nickname should have been Kevin 'White Feather' McBride. Biggest shitebag I've ever seen. Could probably make him faint but bursting a crisp packet. FW Andy Roddie - So bad he actually transcended abuse and became a sort of funny likable clown in a Motherwell shirt. Oh Andy! LOL Another miss from half a yard, whit ye like! FW Khaled Kemas - They called him Hammerfoot after a terrific volleyed goal. Unfortunately before and after they mostly called him Shitefoot. FW Trevor Molloy - The Malpas season in a nutshell. If that nutshell was a really crap Irish footballer with the word footballer in inverted commas. Subs. Colin Meldrum - So bad he kept letting Graeme Smith get back into the team to fuck things up. Eddie Forrest - Airdrie bawbag and crime on the eyes. Gunni Jonsson - Gave away a goal with a slack pass back, scored an OG, gave away a penalty and then got sent off in one match. His 2nd and last match. Joni Lehtonen - Or as he should have been known Joni Who-let-him-on. Mario Doerner - As far as most people are concerned the 2nd worst Austrian of all time.

I remember when even a team like Falkirk would bring a big support. I agree that away supporters are probably the area we could do most to try and attract. If 4,000 Motherwell fans go to a home match and less than a 1,000 go to an away match, that's 3,000 fans that, if they could afford to, would probably want to go to the game and the same could be said for other clubs supporters. It's hard to do though without charging less for away fans than home fans in which case home fans are likely to complain. Otherwise there has to be some kind of initiative between all the clubs where you could buy a sort of season ticket for away games or use a home season ticket to get discounted entry into away grounds. Can't see how any kind of consensus could be reached by the different clubs. Say I could buy a book of five or ten tickets that gained me entry to 5 or 10 away matches of my choice across the season. Depending on price of course, but that would be an attraction to someone who very rarely goes to away games now (usually only cup games).

I've said this over and over but it's basically down to us, the fans, to finance the club because there isn't much sponsorship or TV money out there. If you don't want to pay for a top division side then we'll soon find our level because the club just won't be able to afford the squad to keep us at our current level. I think Motherwell FC have always been pretty fair in terms of pricing admission and season tickets when compared to other sides. During the good times when other teams were ripping off supporters we generally had the lowest or one of the lowest admission and season ticket prices and that's more or less continued up until the present day. There is a balancing act between pricing die hard supporters like myself out of the game and keeping enough turnover to put out a competitive side and I think Motherwell have done that pretty well. Unfortunately reducing prices has been tried and failed to attract enough supporters to make up the financial short fall on a long term basis. I don't earn a lot and would like cheaper prices if it was possible but sadly I don't think it is. I'm paying close to the maximum I can really pay for football now but as I think it's necessary for people like me to put the money into the club to maintain a competitive side I do so without much complaint. Rather than thinking about increasing attendances and revenue I think we actually really need to think about maintaining our current level. My fear is that the time will come when our attendances drop further and we simply cannot raise the revenue required pay for a professional football team. Looking at clubs like Inverness and St. Johnstone I'm amazed they can actually do it on attendances that are often in the 2,000s. In the longer term the financial viability of these clubs has to be questioned.

Kevin McDonald was one of those ones where you 'heard' he was a tremendous player in the reserves and then when he played in the first team he just didn't have it. There are players that when they step up and start playing in front of a crowd they just go into their shell and he was apparently one of those. Stevie Nicholas was a good player that it just didn't work out for at Motherwell. He had injuries and there was a high turn over of different managers at that time which didn't help him. He was in the classic mold of the technically gifted player that struggles for consistency but he wasn't one of the worst ever. He scored a few goals for a start.

You should get some kind of award for remembering that guy. If you asked me to remember every Motherwell player I'd ever seen I'd have never have plucked him out the old memory.

I always felt a bit sorry for Eddie May because everyone was against him from the start plus he was an decent attacking midfielder but McLeish seemed to think he was a right back for some reason known only to him.

Yeah, Kaven is a name that always comes up in these things but go back and watch the video. By no means the worse goalkeeper we've ever had. Also Shaun McSkimming should be nowhere near a worst XI. A good player that McLeish over paid for, hardly McSkimmings fault. Tony Thomas was a pretty good player when he was fit, which was admittedly not very often. Andy Roddie tried hard but he was rotten. Over 50 appearances and couldn't score and would never have scored if we'd given him 500 appearances! Kevin Christie played three games where he looked like he had a pathological fear of footballs, one game were he looked competent and then one game where he was tremendous on a continual loop throughout his Motherwell career. Alan Sneddon and Eddie Forrest should be in the XI. Graeme Smith would probably be my goalkeeper. He's playing for Brechin, a bottom half Division 2 team, and that tells you everything about a goalkeeper who at 30 years old is in his prime.

I've always like Danny Baker but he's gotten better with age, doesn't go on wild rants too often these days and is generally a jolly old man(except when the BBC sack him). His non football week day show was better than the one he does now though. I remember him saying years ago his dad picked Motherwell as a second team but he didn't know why, so I'm assuming its something to do with that. I don't listen to the show until Sunday nights on my iplayer run.

Darren Randolph Luc Nijholt Brian Martin Mitchell van der Gaag Rob McKinnon James McFadden Paul Lambert Phil O'Donnell Davie Cooper Tommy Coyne Dougie Arnott Subs Sieb Dykstra Chris McCart Keith Lasley Stevie Kirk Scott McDonald Mio Krivokapic and Bobby Russell unlucky not to make the 16. Few others as well Tom Boyd, Chris McCart, I'll stop there!

It concerns me when attendances drop below 4,000 because I think has been traditional our base figure in the time that I've been going to the matches and when it goes below that alarm bells should be raised. We were getting decent enough crowds earlier in the season but they have dropped off lately. There could be various reasons for that but I think the Albion Rovers defeat was a huge blow and will lose us much more money than simply losing out on a cup run. Also December/January are expensive months for a lot of people and I know quite a lot of people who go away over the Christmas period. If you see the TV pictures of Fir Park lately though I doubt very much if the club is reporting false figures. Even the East Stand has been pretty sparse.

Jackson Irvine has been on loan from Celtic to Kilmarnock for the first half of the season. Lewis Toshney was on loan from Celtic to Dundee and Peter Pawlett was on loan at St. Johnstone from Aberdeen last season. Don't think there is any reason why we can't loan from other Scottish clubs, even other Premiership clubs.

Occasionally give us a mention by covering virtually every game we play live on radio? That putting aside the discussion before and after matches? Don't know if you noticed by one of the best known football presenters on BBC Scotland is a Motherwell fan who isn't shy about his allegiance. There are several local newspapers cover Motherwell as well.

Point being we get a lot more press coverage than far larger clubs elsewhere in the country.

Heard someone saying somewhere that Partick Thistle put in their worst performance of the season and still won 2-0. Hearts have picked up 1 point at home since August so you'd expect us to win this one. I would especially enjoy a Sutton hat trick in this one but any kind of win will do.

There's barely any interest in the team in our own town never mind in the country at large so why should the media be festooning their newspapers, radio programmes and television with Motherwell FC? Well that might be an argument if it was true but actually Motherwell get an enormous amount of press coverage for the size of the club. Try taking a club that gets 3,763 supporters to their last home match and getting any coverage at all down in England. I'm sure one thing that any player will tell you about coming up here is clubs our size get an enormous amount of media coverage compared to similar sized clubs elsewhere. It's one of the few strengths football has in this country, in that we can attract players that want to make a bit of a name for themselves before moving on. I rarely read newspapers anymore but when I do there is usually some kind of Motherwell related story in their even if it's not a two page spread, we get live matches broadcast across Scotland and the United Kingdom on a regular basis. Take the BBC website for example. Motherwell have 9 non match report stories since the 29th December. Bradford have 2 non match report stories. Coventry have 4 non match report stories. Wolves have 4 non match report stories. All those clubs are at least twice as big as us, from much bigger towns and cities and receive less coverage from the BBC. The last time I had the radio on they were absolutely raving about Motherwell for quite a while, in fact they were probably going overboard with the praise. Everything is relative of course, Celtic, Rangers, Aberdeen etc are all likely to get more attention than us because there is a bigger media audience out there for them, but actually the amount of media coverage Motherwell get is a lot more than most other clubs of our stature get in any other major footballing country.

12.45pm on a Saturday morning is a stupid time to have a football match and I'm absolutely knackered so I'm not too unhappy about this cancellation.

By the way I once saw Shaun Fagan hit a stunning 30 yarder. By all accounts he's signed on loan for the rest of the season. Which is the sensible thing to do. Obviously those that run the club agree with me, they aren't going to spunk hundreds of thousands of pounds on a player because he's had a three week spell of good form and we can now assess him over a longer period with a view to offering a contract in the summer, if he's worth it. Quite why you are getting your knickers in a twist is bizarre. And other people have said the same as we without apparently getting your ire.

I thought he was excellent under Gannon playing in the deep midfield position. Post Gannon he rarely impressed in midfield but we played a different system.

Players move on and that's football. I don't have negative feelings for anyone that's left Motherwell. The club goes on. Some players go on to better things, some don't, others some fit in at certain clubs, others don't, some make the most of their talent and others squander it, it's just the nature of the game. I think Tom Hateley was put in an uncomfortable position during the summer because of his fathers Rangers connections and position in the media. It attracted more news copy and rumours than might have been the case otherwise. My feeling was that Hateley was probably the weakest player in our line up last season so I'm not surprised he's not been a success when much better players have tried and failed but I'm not going to be bitter about it. He's gone, good luck to the guy.

No, not just me. That's because he was actually garbage and anyone not stupid would have seen that. He's played well recently (I gave him my MotM on Saturday) but there are plenty of players for Motherwell that have had good spells but generally have been poor signings. Take Kevin McBride for instance, or John Spencer or Giles Coke or a list of other guys that started off strong and then faded away. It's also a well know phenomena in football that players play for a contract and then suddenly go off the boil again. If we can extend the loan we can evaluate the player over a longer period. We do not have money to throw around at players based on a four match spell of good form. If he plays well over an extended period by all means offer him a contract. Perhaps even a better contract than we can offer now. Remember if we offer Ainsworth a 2 year contract say, that is probably not far off a £200,000 investment. Also try and have the foresight to see that Ainsworth is not going to play as well as he has over the last 4 matches over for the rest of the season. Being a human being he is at best he is going to have good games and bad games.

He is on a good run of form but it wasn't that long ago most people wanted shot of him because he was garbage. I don't think we should sign any player based on 3 or 4 games. An extended loan deal would be a better chance to assess his true worth and would probably led to us being able to tempt him to Fir Park in the summer if his contract is up.