Ya Bezzer!

Well that was a strange one. Great that we won but honestly if it had ended 1-1 I would have thought we were a bit on the lucky side to get a point. First ten minutes was great, scored a cracker and could have buried Ross County completely. But then....we just slowly faded out of the game. Ross County gained confidence and started passing it round us pretty well. Liam Kelly was a lot busier than his fellow keeper up the other end and made a few really good saves. When County scored the goal had been coming for a while. Second half continued in the same vein with Ross County the dominate team but to be fair to us we defended relatively well and we looked dangerous going forward most of the time apart a little spell when it was going a bit Robbo long ball-ish. The substitutes perked us up again. Last 10 or 15 minutes you felt like someone was going to win it and thankfully it was us. Watt, who had an excellent game, did the honours. Probably the poorest overall performance I've seen this season. Slattery was good today however the limitations of our midfield was glaringly shown up. Still we hung in there and took our chances. We needed Kelly and the bar but at the end of the day, we've got the three points and even if the overall play wasn't great today you have to credit the players professionalism and character.

Looks like the big difference is that we've just scored much more consistently across the fixtures rather than having feasts and famines.

You can debate the transfer policy, the technical quality of the players at the club and whole bunch of other stuff but I don't think you can argue that Alexander isn't a big step up as a coach from the previous set up. Latterly you got the impression Robinson would take 0 points before a game at Ibrox just to avoid playing it.

Very good result. 6 games in and we've only lost due to a penalty in a close fought match. Some difficult matches coming up but we should be fairly confident going into them.

I missed one. I'd rather have Andy Goram though.

Just as well there were no forums back in the days when we put out a yellow home top!

I notice that the last time we beat Rangers in a League match Andy Goram was in goals - for Motherwell. Rangers haven't started the season brilliantly; there was a three goal margin against a depleted Livingston side, a two goal margin against Ross County and the three other matches have been 1 goal margins (Celtic, St. Johnstone, Dundee Utd). That says to me we should be capable of keeping the game tight if we are on our game. We've defended quite well in the two matches I've seen in person but I do worry about our midfield and the Rangers full backs keeping us pinned back. Barisic has apparently been poor this season though so perhaps that is an area we can exploit. I also think you can cause Rangers problems by playing balls over their centre backs and making them turn. They aren't great when they are facing their own goal. Overall though you'd be delighted with a point. The main thing is we go there and show some serious ambition to take something from the game. If it turns out to be an unlucky defeat like St Johnstone's then I don't think too many people will be cross but let's ditch the inferiority complex please.

Goalkeeper, centre halves and forwards all could have a claim. Have to go for Kevin van Veen though, a goal an assist and some 'watching through your fingers' type challenges on a yellow!

Just a daft wee stat but Motherwell are the only team in the Premiership to score in every league match this season. Hopefully we can keep that up another week at least...

I understand why it's done but as I said in my original match post I think we did it far too early in the match, there was over 20 minutes to play with injury time. Perhaps Alexander wanted to give the 5 at the back a decent run out for the match at Ibrox but otherwise I think it put us more at risk more than anything else.

Aye.

It was a mixed bag. But I actually applauded him at one point when he booked an Aberdeen player (Ferguson I think) for pulling on Woolery's shirt. That's a big bugbear for me and I think referee's need to clamp down on it. If you are obstructing a players movement by jersey pulling why is that different than chopping him down?

Exactly this. Aberdeen had 23 shots and Kelly didn't have a serious save to make. Pretty much everything they hit that was on target was tame and down the middle of the goal. I would precede with caution on giving the opposition possession. If you have possession you control the game. If you don't you are depending on what the opposition do or don't do. Yesterday Aberdeen couldn't shot for toffee so we got away with it. Does anything think Rangers will have 23 shots at goal and not score? We deserved the win yesterday but the match stats were a bit of an anomaly. Over the season we are going to have to up our possession stats and control the midfield in more matches. If we don't, there will be consequences over the long term. I've not updated my stats yet but I think in terms of headed goals we have 6 and the next nearest team is Celtic on 3. Most other teams are on 1 or 0. It's a good thing that we are capable of scoring in these situations and I'm not making out that it's not but we cannot depend on headed goals across the season. Guaranteed teams will learn and be trying to counter act our strengths as we go into the 2nd phase of the season so we can't be dependent on a single strategy.

Nothing on the SPFL site.

Blood and snotters type game. Not great quality but entertaining and a deserved win. Think that's 6 out of 8 goals scored from headers, something like that. Van Veen brought a lot to the match, we had much more up front that we did against Dundee. Watt and Van Veen looked like they can be a good spearhead. Still don't have a midfield really but I thought Slattery showed a bit more and although Woolery didn't do a whole lot did put in the cross for the first goal. Defensively I thought we were pretty strong looking for the most part. McGinlay was the weak link and he was getting done by Ramsay in the first half but I thought in the second half we were fairly solid looking and weren't under too much pressure despite the slightly odd tactical change by Alexander which I thought was made a bit early in the match. The two centre halves did well and I thought Mugabi has been decent at right back across the two games I've seen. Kelly didn't have any amazing saves to make but his handling was very good and took a lot of pressure off. It's workman like but the team was up for it from the beginning to the end and if we can perform like that going forward you'd imagine we will cause teams some problems.

Don't bet on Motherwell but I saw we are 3.10 on Bet 365! Decent odds, I'd say.

You might be right but Lamie has pretty much played ever match under Alexander. So much so if Alexander has a 'go to guy' in the squad it's probably Lamie. Time will tell, I guess.

In 20+ league matches under Alexander we've played 3 at the back once so I just don't see that happening unless he's had a complete change of mind. Alexander could have changed the 4-3-3 when he first arrived, he could have changed it at the beginning of this season and he did neither so I think he'll probably continue with it. Kelly O'Donnell - Ojala - Lamie - Carroll O'Hara - Slattery - Goss Watt - Van Veen - Roberts That way you have left footers all down the left, right footers all down the right, seems balanced.

Looked better than Woolery or Amaluzor have shown so far. Plus it adds competition for places.

Only surprise in the return of Roberts is it didn't happen before now.

Two points on the weekend 1) We played 4-3-3 against 4-5-1 and won despite playing quite poorly. I'll highlight this as evidence on my claim that formations don't really matter much at this level of football, or at least are hugely over rated in terms of determining who actually wins a game. 2) Our shots to shots on target ratio last season under Robinson was about 1 in 4. This season (small sample size I'll admit) it's 1 in 2. Big, big difference if you want to dig out results. 20/21 Robinson - 3.82 20/21 Alexander - 3.00 21/22 Alexander - 2.00 I dunno, maybe it's an aspect of the game that Alexander deserves a wee bit credit for.

Literally the best ball Woolery had at the weekend was when he tried to take a touch, his touch was so bad the ball ricocheted up and off his face and then dropped into a good position for him to run on to it. Maybe it was just one of those things that happens to everyone once in a while but when it happens the first time you see a guy it doesn't exactly fill you with confidence.

Kinda surprising that we've only had one Swedish player down the years. Probably up until relatively recently moving from Sweden to Scotland would have been a big step up, although I doubt you could say it's any kind of step up these days.

It looked a bit high to me on the replays. If you go over the ankle I think you are asking for trouble. I think it was at least borderline so it's not something I'm going to get hugely excited about either way, especially since it didn't effect the result.

I defended Alexander last season because he inherited a shambles and he had one job to do and that was keep us up. He's had a transfer window now though and I have to say I wasn't really impressed with the new guys he's brought in. I do think you need to let a team bed in though so come November/December that'll be when you really come to a conclusion but honestly I didn't see a lot of ability out there. You'd hope we'd be better with van Veen and Goss as starters but let's be honest we are scoring off set plays and that's about the sum of it.