Ya Bezzer!

If we got £200 for Humphrey and used half of that to get Jim O'Brien back at Fir Park that would be a great deal.

Would imagine Broadfoot would get a club down in England that can pay a lot more than anyone in the SPL. Riordan, a big risk - could pay off big time or be a total waste of money. His performances for St. Johnstone last season were very poor, got to say I think I'd avoid which says a lot when you consider the undoubted talent he has. Not really a big fan of Sheridan either. I agree that we really need a midfielder. Would love someone like Andrew Shinnie, we are crying out for a player like that.

I wouldn't abandon this tactic although there are obviously things to work on. At the end of the day we got a draw against what I think will be a hard team to beat this season and pretty much our entire midfield didn't perform. Our failings weren't entirely tactical yesterday it was just that the entire midfield failed to perform on the day, that happens some times, it doesn't write off an entire tactical approach. We've had much worse results and performances in a 4-4-2. For me one of McCall's biggest failings is his reluctance to try new things so I'm certainly not going to criticize him for the set up yesterday.

Went for Cummins. Looks very composed much like Reynolds when he first came into the team. Maybe Hutchy can learn something from him rather than the other way around!

We started like this today. ----------------------------Randolph--------------------------- --------------Hutchinson-----------------Cummins--------------- Kerr--------------------------------------------------Hammell-- --------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------Hetherington----------------------- --------------Lasley------------------------Law---------------- --------------------------------------------------------------- ------------Ojamaa-------------------------------Murphy-------- ----------------------------Higdon----------------------------- Without a wide midfielder/winger and Ojamaa/Murphy tucked infield we looked exposed down our flanks, especially the right hand side where Carey was getting a lot of good crosses into the box. Hard to really say if the tactical set up was a success or not as Lasley/Law/Murphy/Ojamaa were all sub par today which left a decent back four performance and an isolated Higdon up front.

I was quite excited when I saw our formation at the beginning of the match as it looked like Murphy and Ojamaa would be playing relatively narrow and infield and Nicky Law was on the left of midfield where I think he usually performs best. It certainly seemed to work early on as we scored in the first couple of minutes. Can't say too much about it as I didn't see the build up and only saw Higdon tucking it away. You'd have thought we would build on that but it was as positive as it got for us in the match. St. Mirren passed the ball around well and by about the 20th minute they were dominating and pretty much held the ascendancy for the rest of the match. The problem, in my opinion, was central midfield. With Ojamaa and Murphy just behind Higdon that meant St. Mirren had 4 midfielders on our 3 and Law and Lasley looked fatigued, never really getting into the game. As a result we never really got a grip on the game and if you compare the number of saves made by Darren Randolph with the number made by Craig Samson they it pretty much tells you who was on top. The Hutchinson sending off will probably be identified as the turning point in the match. Admittedly I was down the other end of the East Stand and others will have got a better view of it but to me it looked a foul and what really annoyed me about it is that virtually every match you can bet that Hutchinson will give away a foul in the exact position. Whether he got the ball or not he should not be putting himself in that position and he does it week after week after week. When is it going to sink in Hutchy? It's such a shame because he was probably our best player in the match but I'm afraid he's blotted his copy book with me and it's probably cost of the game. It was almost inevitable that he was going to get sent off after the Thompson incident and he didn't 'disappoint'. The only real positives were the performances of some of the younger players. Cummins was excellent and looks like an excellent prospect. Hetherington made mistakes but he certainly gave a lot of effort and I have a feeling once he has a bit more experience he will be a decent squad member. Kerr did well considering I though he was often left quite exposed. Francis-Angol didn't get much opportunity but once again I have to ask what exactly does Carswell do? I must have seen him come on 9 or 10 times now and I don't think I've seen a single thing of note from him. Was it a coincidence that St. Mirren pressed us even harder after Nicky Law was replace by Carswell - perhaps but perhaps not. Overall it was not a good performance but we are still undefeated having played some tough midweeks between weekend matches, we have a decent points tally with scope for improvement but on todays evidence St. Mirren looked more like a Top Six side than we did.

Finally get to see the team again, only seen the Panathinaikos game this season. I think it will be a tough match. St.Mirren are a different animal under Danny Lennon have quite a few decent attacking players in the team, I think they will definitely pose a danger especially in midfield with guys like Imrie, McGowan, Carey, McLean etc. I've not seen much of the team but I've been a bit depressed reading some of the after match comments and we seem to be struggling to create chances. Hopefully we can turn that around but I wouldn't be surprised if we lack a little energy after the midweek match. Perhaps McCall can give some of the younger players a run out in this one, I'm looking forward to seeing Francis-Angol and Hetherington for the first time if they get the chance.

I have the proud record of having seen all our home European ties but I won't make it to this one unfortunately as it was too short notice for me to get the evening off work. It will be another colossal task, the gap in finances is huge, but I just hope that we give a good account of our selves, if we do that there is always an outside chance we could get a result.

I'm sure Higdon let him know what he thought!

I wasn't at the game so I can't argue about Murphy's overall performance but watching the highlights he was involved in just about every positive moment shown. He was involved in the goal, playing the ball out wide and then drawing the defenders (both were watching Murphy while McHugh found space). He then had a run and an excellent cross from which Higdon almost won the game with his header. Then finally he won the header from the corner that ended up as the McHugh/Hutchinson scrabble right at the end. Murphy doesn't always dominate matches but in my opinion he's usually involved when something positive happens and if you take him out the side we lose a lot.

If MJC getting his hole guarentees a Motherwell win I think we should all chip in for a hooker.

Did you read the after match comments last week? Contrast what Darren Randolph said with what his manager said. There will be no 'dare to dream' while McCall is manager of Motherwell. His style, if you were being kind, is a modest pragmatism. In a general sense it has worked for him but when it comes to games like these I don't think there is much chance of us causing a shock any time soon. As for Dundee United, they are quite a bit better than us IMO and will prove so this season. If top level football is all about having a cutting edge then their front trio of Russell, Daly, and Mackay-Steven are probably the best in the league right now and that's including Celtic. I'd still expect them to go out tonight though. Also bear in mind that Panathinaikos are the premier team of Athens/Greece, the same cannot be said of Dinamo Moscow who are the least supported team in Moscow (Spartak, CSKA, Lokomotiv are all bigger clubs)and behind other Russian teams like Zenit, Anzhi, Rubin Kazan etc.

Its strange that the two players who have scored the most goals in a team that, those two apart, hardly scores any goals would get all the stick. They only scored 29 goals between them last season! Welcome to the illogical world of Steelmen Online.

Anyway, I agree with your first point, this goes beyond "Daley is pish" talk but I'm not so sure I agree with the second point. I don't really think tonights result has anything to do with 'systemic problems in Scottish football'. We simply played a much bigger team, with a bigger budget, with better players, who have more experience at this level. If we had played a Greek team of roughly the same size and income as ours, a team like Giannina or Iraklis, we might well have gone through in the tie and you mostly likely wouldn't have seen the same technical gap. At the end of the day it comes down to money and we are a small club without much to spend. I didn't see tonight's match but I was there last week and the two Panathinaikos players that looked a cut above our guys were both non Greek - Sissoko and Zeca, i.e. it was money that brought them into the Panathinaikos squad in terms of, possibly fees, but certainly wages. Those guys were the difference between the teams and if we'd had the money to outbid Panathinaikos for them they might well have been the difference then as well.

Will be at work taking sneaky looks at Flashscores when the boss is in the meeting room.

If they can identify the people responsible send them the bill! Guaranteed we'd never have anything like this happen again.

Looks like the Keith Lasley/Fraser Fyvie incident from last season!

St. Johnstone lined up like this last weekend. -------------Mannus------------ ----McCracken--------Wright---- Mackay-----------------C.Davidson --------Cregg----M.Davidson Millar------------------Craig --------Tade-----Hasselbaink Looks like a pretty solid line up that should finish Top 6, although I think there are some question marks over Steve Lomas as a manager. There squad is quite small but in my opinion a bit stronger than ours, they can bring in guys like Steven Anderson, Kevin Moon, Jamie Adams, David Robertson, Tam Scobbie etc. We don't have that sort of experience on the bench. Tade/Hasselbaink could be quite a tricky front two but I'm not sure when Tade's suspension kicks in from his sending off last Saturday. There was also talk of the red card being rescinded. If Tade is out it will probably be Stevie May who comes in, one of those guys who has scored goals at a lower level but hasn't done it at the top level. They also have a new forward called Rowan Vine but I don't know anything about him. He's been transfered twice for more than a million pounds (Birmingham, QPR) so he might be one to look out for. Also perhaps someone people don't pay much attention to but I've liked Chris Millar on the right wing when I've seen him, he was superb when they beat us at Fir Park last season and the Saints fans seem to rate him quite highly, but I think he's had problems with injuries that have held him back a bit.

Judging by the highlights they were a bit unlucky to lose to Hearts at the weekend.

I think a lot of people are doing Ross County down unfairly, they'll be a hard team to beat on their own patch. Don't know anything about the match cos I was at work but to me if you draw away and win at home that's prety good form. Now we just have to win at home!

The media thinks football can't survive without it and that it performs some life saving task by covering it. But actually the reverse is (or was) true. We get roughly the same number of punters through the gates as we did 10 or 20 years ago. The Daily Record is in steep and probably irreversible decline. If I remember correctly it's circulation figures have halved. So old Hugh probably thinks because print journalism has never been at a lower ebb than now and Scottish sports journalism is still stuck in the 1980's in terms of the kind of coverage it offers and is being roundly ignored that Scottish football is in the same boat. It isn't. If you think Scottish football needs a print media to succeed look at a newspaper from the 1970's or 1960's. There is hardly any sport in them, a couple of pages at most. Sports coverage has expanded exponentially as a crotch to hold up flagging newspaper sales, but now that isn't working any more because people get their sports coverage elsewhere. The media just thinks people aren't interested in football and that "everything is doomed" because it can't see outside it's own little media bubble. I've spent a bit of time in Italy in recent years and although Italian television is dismal the print media is very good. The football coverage, especially analysis and build up, you get in the specialist sports newspapers is miles ahead of what we get over here.

OK, but 'Night Boat to Cairo' is better anyway. Oh and they should have played 'Embarrassment' when Sissoko came back on the other night.

Mr. Rae probably is Jim Traynor and Hugh Keevins.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion but I don't understand how people can say that someone who scored 13 goals from left wing for Motherwell in a season is one of the poorer players. He has good and bad games just like everyone at our level but if you take last night as an example he was roasting their right back, a Greek international with 40 caps, all the first half, and was the only player in the team capable of running past players. But if that's your opinion, that's your opinion.

If Ojamaa was better at "thinking football" he'd pass the ball to team mates in better positions instead of being a greedy wee shite. Also are you suggesting Ojamaa only plays well with players he is close to in his personal life? If so that's the height of unprofessionalism. When he's on form he's a good player but I think he's got a lot to learn if he wants to go further in the game.