Ya Bezzer!

He's a pale shadow of the player he was last season. He must be carrying an injury. No one goes that downhill in one close season. He can barely run.

Lasley was tremendous today, especially in the first half.

The one he got away with the worst of the lot. Summed up referee Charleston.

First hour was the best football we've played this season. We created so many chances the game should have really been wrapped up. Samson made a superb save and we looked to have a stonewall penalty denied as well by a referee who to put it mildly wasn't very good. As in the Partick match we seemed to tire and drop deep and what should have been a comfortable win became a lucky 3 points. There were various hearts in mouths moments and I think Kilmarnock will be disappointed not to get something out of the game. Good though to see some good performances which have mostly been lacking up till now. Sutton and Anier did well up front, Hutchinson and Carswell defended well and I thought Lasley was immense today.

Got Killie at 5.00 Purely for consolation of course, hopefully I don't win this one!

Motherwell strong favourites with the bookies.

Moore has taken the field this season while Erwin has not. Fair to say Moore seems to be ahead of Erwin in the front player pecking order.

We have a larger budget than Inverness. It must also be harder to convince players to join Inverness due to the location. It's a long commute from central Scotland, never mind England. I still rate Terry Butcher as the best Motherwell manager since Tommy McLean. It was Terry Butcher's donkey work that set up our recent consistent spell of Top 6 finishes. He worked miracles with no money when other clubs were still splashing the cash around, his cup record was superb and he brought in probably the best outfield player we've had at the club in the last ten years, Scott McDonald. His five years at the club were the foundation for everything every manager since then has achieved.

Have a wee soft spot for Roma and Palermo having spent time in both cities. Roma, of course, have the same colours as Motherwell which is nice. Perhaps we can adopt a pink away strip!

He has a good overall record but he hasn't scored in 13 matches for Kilmarnock. Not exactly on form.

I think this is going to be an important match because if we can get some confidence up we have a reasonable kind run of matches that we could take a fair few points from (Kilmarnock, Ross County, St. Mirren, Dundee Utd). Kilmarnock seem to me to be a bit like us in that they haven't got a settled midfield yet, although up front and at the back they seem decent. So far Kilmarnock have scored in three out of four games but never scored more than one in a game, same as us, while they have conceded 5 goals over 4 matches, same as us. Has a 1-1 draw all over it.

I think 'dominated' is a bit strong and I think your 70 minutes is wrong as well. For me the game started to swing when they brought on Higginbotham on 52 minutes. We were already looking shaky when Carswell (who was injured making a defensive challenge just over our 18 yard line remember) went off. The reason we got the full 3 points yesterday was because Partick don't have a penalty box striker. If Kris Boyd or Billy Mackay had been playing yesterday we'd probably wouldn't have got a clean sheet.

We missed Carswell when he went off but the tide of the match had turned before his injury.

I didn't think anyone was outstanding. About half the team was a wee bit better than the other half and in all honesty I could have given it to 4 or 5 players. Carswell and Anier didn't finish so I will rule them out for that reason. Hutchinson, Ramsden kept clean sheets, Sutton got a goal. I'll go for Ramsden.

Scary second half, we were hanging on for the last half hour or so and I'm sure many a finger nail was bitten! First half I thought Partick were quite poor and we were the better team in a half that didn't really catch fire. Second half though Partick were a different side and had us pinned back for long periods and as mentioned there was so hair raising moments. We could have made it a much easier watch if we'd taken one of the various break away changes we had, Lasley should have made it 2-0 and McFadden could have done a lot better on a number of occasions. Not a great performance but happy with 3 points, debatable if we deserved full points from the match.

Undefeated in the first seven matches last season. 3 wins, 4 draws. After that we had a bad spell of 4 defeats in 5 matches but we already had some 'points on the board' and our lowest position in the league was 8th.

You can play well, make a mistake or two and lose the match. Or you can just play poorly making many mistakes some of which are ultimately punished by the opposition. We are closer to the latter rather than the former at the moment. The four matches I've seen in the flesh (Newcastle, Nottingham, Krasnodar, Aberdeen) we've shown virtually nothing. I've also seen two live matches on television and although those performances were better, we made a number of mistakes and created very little in those matches as well. Some posters might either be hysterics or depressives with their reactions at this stage of the season but there comes a point, especially during the first round of matches in a season, when it becomes difficult for teams to get into a different gear if they have stalled over the first 7 or 8 games. We won't have a write off season if Partick beat us at the weekend but we will be one match further down a path that we really don't want to go down.

We're not playing a Partick Thistle side that's spent 10 years in the 1st division. We are playing a Partick Thistle that won the 1st division and has outplayed every team in the SPL that it's come up against so far. The team of 8 or 9 years ago has nothing to do with this one. Some of the younger posters might not have much memory of Partick Thistle at Fir Park but they have always been a bit of a bogey side for us, especially at Fir Park. On the up side though they seem to have had trouble translating dominating the play into goals, they really ought to have beaten Dundee Utd and Hearts and failed to do so. I don't think we can afford another poor performance. First of all if we do play poorly we will probably lose but more importantly I think when you have this many poor performances back to back it is very difficult to get player attitude and confidence up for games as they go into a psychological rut. We need the players to raise it for this one, otherwise that will be 8 poor performances in a row (only the fact that we beat Hibs made the performance palatable) and that does not bode well.

I'm guessing our player budget won't be the problem. We can fairly easily set a budget and stick to it. There are many other running costs though that we have less control over.

With a 4-2-3-1 I would go with the standard back four plus .....Lawson.....Lasley Anier....McFadden....Vigurs ..........Sutton I don't really go along with the idea that McFadden can't play in wide positions but he's been so poor if he is going to play I think we need to mix it up a bit and try something different, hence McFadden playing behind the main striker in a more central position. People will say Vigurs has no pace but his reputation as a footballer mostly rests on his excellent performances last season from wide left. I say we put him back in the position that's he's been used to playing with Ross County even if like Hateley before him, he likes to think of himself as a central midfielder. Anier I think could play on the right as an emergency until we get a proper right winger in at the club. He's got a bit of pace about him and I think it would be at least worthwhile to see if he could play there and increase our options. Who's to say he couldn't do on the right what Jamie Murphy used to do on the left?

To play 5 (or 3 if you prefer) at the back you not only need good attacking wing backs, which we don't seem to have at the moment, you also need someone who can play the 'sweeper' position which is a specialized position in itself. Do we have someone that can play this role? Because if we can't defend well in the most basic footballing formation of 2 lines of 4 then I dread to think what might happen if we complicate matters with a 3/5 at the back. Just as scoring goals isn't dependent on numbers of strikers, the same can be said of defending, it is not simply a matter of having more bodies back there. My preference would be for a 4-2-3-1 formation as I think that offers the most flexibility. Having said that formations won't win games unless players perform and right now we look to be severely lacking in team spirit, confidence and basic competency in areas such as defending high balls and passing.

I would play a 4-2-3-1. You need attacking full backs to play 3 at the back. We could do it with McKinnon and Shannon, can't do it with Ramsden and Hammell.

If I was manager Faddy wouldn't even be playing next week. He's either nowhere near fit or needs a spell on the bench to improve his attitude.

Think this could be another difficult match. I'd fully expect Inverness to be one of the better teams this season.

As I pointed out before the European tie we have 15 outfield players with any first team experience. Our squad is so thread bare we literally can't put out a second XI.