Ya Bezzer!

Well it went as expected. Fans can go on about Alexander or this or that player but here's the absolute truth here. The team that's fifth in the League of Ireland came to Fir Park and not only deservedly beat us, they looked better than most of the teams we played last season. As I've said for some time the overall standard of Scottish football and the Premiership is very low and no one should be surprised about what happened tonight. Sligo would most likely beaten St Mirren, St Johnstone, Livingston, Hibs etc as well. This probably won't be a popular opinion on here but the rest of us live off the Old Firm. Without them our league set up would be on a par with the League of Ireland. Maybe worse because they probably aren't completely deluded about the level they are playing at in Ireland. You can sack the manager and bring in 22 new players but nothing changes until we tackle the fundamental failures that have plagued Scottish football for 30 years and are getting worse as every season passes.

Looking forward to the match, so begins my 36th season as a season ticket holder! If you've been paying attention to the League Cup we've seen loads of teams in our bracket not doing very well against lower league teams. Start of the season fitness is definitely part of that but I also think the standard of the Premiership teams has never been lower, hence the gap in quality is smaller and the lack of creativity at the top level means lower league sides can defend quite comfortably against 'top' level teams. St Mirren, Hibs and St Johnstone are all basically out and Livingston and Ross County haven't had it all their own way either. Sligo being well into their season will make that fitness factor even more acute. Van Veen missing (most likely) is also a blow. We literally don't have a player in the squad with 10 league goals for the club but Van Veen was the closest. I'll be looking closely at Spittal and Morris to give us the composure on the ball we lacked last season. and what they add going forward. Hopefully we get off to a good start and an early goal would settle everyone down. However if it doesn't come I'd like to think the support can get behind the team. Anyway, time to board the rollercoaster once again....

I was listening to Radio 4 one day and they had a statistician on and he said every team should be 3/1 every time. That's what the actual odds are. When bookies offer 1.5 or 2.0's they are ripping the piss. The whole thing is statistically fixed so you literally cannot win, at least in the middle to long term. I make a £1 bet every day, mainly just to research teams around the world and keep up to date on football, and this season I won the first eight, lost the next three and I'm back to exactly where I was in terms of balance. Yep 8/3 win ratio and I'm even stevens. It's a complete con, play for fun, sure, but never ever think you are going to actually make money.

There are guys out there that are 20 minutes at 0-0 away from losing the plot - at the manager in particular. Like I said some of the vitriolic abuse online before the season has even started is genuinely dispiriting. Last season on this very forum against Livingston we had posters saying they hoped we lost a match that had the potential to get us Top 6. Crazy. Even before that we had the extraordinary scenes at Fir Park when fans applauded Stevie Robinson, who left us in a terrible state and on the brink of relegation, and at the same time booed and screamed abuse at the current Motherwell manager that had just horsed Robinson and his St Mirren side. You couldn't make it up. I know society in general is going to hell in a hand basket but it seems like our a significant section of our support is part of the vanguard. We are a small self financed club with no outstanding talents on the roster. Like I said we need to manage our expectations. That's not to say we shouldn't try to win or try to play good football but there has to be some kind of realistic expectation of where we are.

Far stronger? If you transferred all our players to various Irish League sides how many of them do you think would be stand out players in the League of Ireland? Probably not very many of them. I'd love to be proved wrong about this tie but I think we have to be very wary and not under estimate them but perhaps most importantly not overestimate ourselves. Scottish clubs in Europe, outside the Old Firm, have generally had an atrocious record. Our own recent record against Stjarnan, Glentoran, Coleraine and Hapoel Beer Sheva doesn't give great confidence, especially since we had better players in those campaigns than we do now. I just have a fear that Scottish football fans being what they are, we'll turn up on the night expecting to roll this team over easily, and if we don't score early, and discover the gap between us and them isn't as big as they though, the crowd will get on the teams back. I was Instagram the other day and some of the abuse the manager and players are getting on there before the season has even started is ridiculous. I don't want sound like a prophet of doom cos I think we are 65 - 70% shots to win this tie but it's very possible it could be a close run thing and it's certainly not impossible for us to lose it. We need to manage our expectations but I suspect the majority of our supporters won't. They didn't last season so why would that change?

Think everyone needs to calm down and concentrate on beating Sligo first!

Knowing Turkish teams I hope we got the money up front for Woolery!

Surely the goalkeeper interest is due to PJ Morrison going to Falkirk? Scott Fox, in my opinion, was never a very good goalkeeper in the first place. At his age and with his lack of game time you'd hope we'd be looking around for another keeper. We don't want to have another situation akin to a couple of seasons ago where we get an injury and then only have 1 first team level goalkeeper available.

For me he's alway been better coming off the bench.

Killie were given the runaround for most of the match and Donnelly was the first player subbed. Not exactly a confidence builder for Kilmarnock. It's actually interesting just how poor the Premiership teams have been in the League Cup so far. The only team with two wins is Aberdeen and that was against very low level sides.

We had a terrible record against Hearts through the mid eighties to early nineties. I don't know exactly but I think it was about 15 games or something without a win, or maybe 1 win. Something like that anyway! I'll maybe look that up later on. EDIT - 2 wins in 36 between 1983 - 1993 and a run of 0 wins in 15 between 1985 and 1988.

Walter Kidd, Brian Whittaker, Gary Mackay, Kenny Black etc. Then add in cheating wee c*nts like Colquhoun and Robertson.....

Isn't that just modern football though? The centre forward pairing is no more unfortunately and I'd rather 'anywhere in the front 3' than 'big guy that holds the ball up and flicks things on'. That seems to be your choices these days.

Imagine last years Aberdeen minus Ramsay, Ferguson and Ramirez. Ouch.

Robinson - Carson - Gallagher - O'Hara start the season with a 0-1 home defeat to Arbroath in what one Buddy at the match described as "One of the worst St. Mirren performances I've ever seen".

That match was a great result but a terrible game. Was played in gale force winds making it almost impossible to play any football. Kinda similar to the Hibs match last season.

We barely scrapped past two Northern Irish teams last time and I'd expect Sligo to be better than them. If you look at Sligo's Euro results they have been pretty competitive against some decent opposition (Rosenborg, Nantes, Spartak Trnava. Herenveen, Club Brugge etc.) Last pumping was back in 1996 against Lillestrom. If you are expecting us to breeze past Sligo, think again.

Maybe not 'sorry to see go' but when you are bringing in similar level players or, often, poorer players I think you are better sticking with a stable squad. Obviously you have to freshen things up too and try and improve weaker areas of the squad but if we had basically the same core over the next three years I think we'd improve. Player turnover might have increased in modern times but I still think ours has been extremely excessive. How many guys have we brought in in January that have literally never played for us? Or barely played? That alone would give you a nice list.

I think a lot of people reckon that Derek McInnes track record in the Premiership will see Kilmarnock good but re-signing Alan Power, bringing in Donnelly and already having Polworth there suggests other wise. They also have a brutal opening fixture list, easily the hardest of any of the teams. For me could be contenders to go straight back down.

I'll always remember that game because it's the only time I've watched a Motherwell match from the Cooper Stand. Think the only other time I've been in there was a Scotland U21 match against Austria.

When people ask this question I usually say this even though at the end of the day there was no great stakes and it was 3 points and nothing more. There was so much incident in this match the highlights barely cover it. Look out for Motherwell 'favourite' John Clark giving Dougie a hard boot after the 2nd penalty award! And Andy Roddie missing his big chance to score a goal for us.

This. It's really amazing that a lot of people have written off Efford after him, as you say, coming in mid-season, playing a whole 16 matches for the club (not all starts), scoring 3 goals and getting an assist. Scottish football is a whole different beast from US or European football and Efford has struggled with the physical side of the game but you have to give guys a chance to settle in and adapt. It might turn out he's not good enough but our single biggest problem as a football club over the, say, last 5 seasons, has been the absolutely monumental turn over of players. We need a settled side and we need to promote 'Maguire' level players and give them game time. Guys like Quinn, Murphy, Clarkson etc weren't great when they first came into the team and we need to get back to developing players over 2 or 3 seasons instead of concentrating on mercurial talent that gets sold on after 6 months to a year. Of course if another Turnbull comes along, great, but we need a longer term strategy for player development, either bringing players in or through our youth squad.

Hopefully they don't drop any plates on the dinner guests and get a job at the Moorings.

Hibs mainly played 3 at the back last season with McGinn as the right sided defender. Maybe the new manager has a different defensive set up in mind? They also brought in Lewis Miller the young Australian player who is a right back as well as Allan Deferriere who is also a right back and also have Chris Cadden who can play there. Most managers want to bring in their own players. They have also brought in five midfielders/forwards with Doidge apparently on the way out.

He played 34 matches for Hibs last season. And bare in mind Hibs had 3 different managers last season who would all would have had different ideas. He also scored 3 league goals which would have made him our joint second highest scorer!