Ya Bezzer!

Is this the Chris Cadden who's last league goal was 46 games ago? Has very little effect on matches these days and its debatable if he should even be in the first XI. Cadden was a prospect when he broke through but Robinson's tenure was a huge blow to his development. To be honest going to Hearts would be a smart move for him. He's not good enough to play at a higher level but he'd get paid a lot more and might kick on again away from Fir Park.

Some of their behaviour at away matches has been an embarrassment to the club, and to themselves, for some time. Absolutely cringe worthy stuff. I also heard from Sligo fans that one of their supporters was physically attacked. If so, bans are the consequence. There's no doubt a group like the Well Bois can contribute positively but in my opinion there has been more negative than positive recently. The club needs to keep these guys under control and if you ask me some 'pruning' is in order. As for the atmosphere I'm sure it would pep up a bit if there was anything worth cheering.....perhaps a home league win before December would lift the mood?

I'll accept that I'm getting old and crotchety but to me this attitude is part of the problem. Ask players in the 80 & 90's, and even the 00's, about losing in two major finals and they'd probably say it was the worst experience of their careers. These days players say it was the highlight. They are natural born losers. I'll say it again and again. Professional standards have been lowered over and over until we have the current standard of player - small time, lower league journey men. We need to start making demands of the players again. If you play in the top level of a national league you should have basic passing skills. A lot of our squad don't even have that. I don't expect us to win every game but I expect us to try and win every game. Doesn't happen any more. Last weeks debacle against Livingston showed just how far we'd fallen. Not just a Motherwell problem, the whole game in Scotland needs a massive kick up the arse.

Dunne was fairly solid on his return but we weren't really put under a lot of pressure. Turnbull came in and did well, needs a run of games now but I felt he fell out of it in the last third. I thought Allan Campbell was our best player today. Was always looking to get on the ball and do something and made some good defensive tackles. Still not at his peak form but you fear for us if he wasn't there.

Ian McCall has spoken often about how Ayr Utd is his perfect job and his great relationship with the chairman. Doubt he'd be interested. Don't think Lambert would touch us with a barge pole either.

Assuming Robinson was fired I don't think Lasley is a stick-on given that financially the club has to remain in the Premiership. Placing a guy with no managerial experience in charge would be a huge risk. Having said that I don't understand the antipathy towards Lasley as manager when the current incumbent is so bad. Do you really believe a Lasley managed team would be even worse than this one?

We have a very tough fixture list coming up after the next two against Dundee and St. Mirren. As is well known I'm not particularly a fan of Robinson but I don't see what kind of improvement is likely from firing him given the upcoming matches. There is no point changing the manager over the next couple of months. Right now the change needs to come from the manager and his philosophy rather than a change of manager. If nothing improves when we get into December then will be the time to make the change and give the incoming manager a better chance to pick up points and bring in new faces. Bringing in a new manager to face off against Celtic twice, Aberdeen, Rangers, Hearts etc is basically chopping off the new guys legs straight from the start. I'm afraid you wanted Robinson and now you need to take your medicine.

Our team has been built, by the manager, around set pieces. The forwards we have reflect that.

Johnson is still has to prove he's a goalscorer at Premiership level but at least his attributes as a player are different from Bowman/Main/Sammon and give us a bit more variety up front.

If he was brought in to score goals then the management have misjudged him as a player. If Main and Bowman, neither of whom are goalscorers are played together, then that is also a misjudgement by the management. I agree on Johnson, he should play alongside one of the others.

He should be playing alongside a goalscorer. Ask the manager why we have a squad with three similar style forwards who aren't goalscorers. I don't have the answer to that.

I think that's a bit unfair. He's just not a goalscorer.

If we can't beat a team as poor as that St. Johnstone team at home we are in serious trouble. For me two bad teams with very little quality between them basically cancelled each other out for most of the match but when it came down to the crunch St. Johnstone upped it and put us under pressure for the last 10 - 15 minutes. Shouldn't it be the home team doing that to the away team? Created virtually nothing in the second half except for a couple of excellent balls from Turnbull taking out the St. Johnstone defence. Main yet again proved his shooting is no where near good enough, even if he does work hard outside the box. We need a goalscorer desperately. In a year of league football (28/10/2017 - now) we have a 21.6% win ratio or 8 wins from 37 matches. We have now failed to score in 5 out of 9 league matches and conceded in all 9. Can only be described as atrocious. Things getting pretty serious now. We cannot lose to either St. Mirren or Dundee.

'Better' than the Livingston match but still far too much high ball and heidy tennis. Bizarre sub of Taylor Sinclair after 23 minutes. Not saying I rate the player but for me that is poor player management unless its injury related which it didn't look to be. Usual problems creating anything outside of high balls into the box but Turnbull has been tidy on the ball. St. Johnstone almost a carbon copy of us, ie very low quality.

Objectively, I don't think Robinson should be fired now or in the next two matches. However the problem with Robinson is he has shown absolutely no scope for change, no plan B, no notion of any kind of joined up long term planning and no interest in modern or entertaining football. It's all been percentage football and that is a problem when your win percentage is hovering just about 20%. Robinson has to show that going forward we are going to improve and get easier on the eye and if I'm honest I don't think he has it in him and that puts into question just how much longer you stick with him. It's not all about the past, a big part of it is the future. Where is Robinson taking us? Of course, no one can predict the future but you have to look at trends, form, recurring patterns to try and judge that as best as possible. The prospect of the rest of this season and potentially a season after that watching the same kind of football that we've watched pretty much for a whole calendar year is pretty depressing, regardless of whether we get relegated or not.

950.

Perhaps we can finally ditch the whole 'budget' excuse for playing atrocious football. Doesn't cost a penny to pass a ball as our youth team proved today. Thought we got a bit lucky on the tackle that the Sligo player was stretchered off after. Don't think there was malice in it but the boy (I've forgotten who it actually was that made the tackle) went in studs up. At least a yellow but the ref let it go.

Really enjoyed that today. Don't see the U20s a whole lot but since Craigan took over I've always been very impressed when I have seen them and today was no different. It's a shame more weren't at the match (att 950 ) to see how the game should be played. Excellent stuff, every player composed on the ball, ball on the grass, good movement on and off the ball. We maybe lack a real goal poacher, although James Scott is a hard worker and good team player, but other than that I thought we were very good. When you go to see U20s football you are maybe expecting to see perhaps 2, 3, maybe 4 players who could potentially step up but I thought every outfield player today showed something. Having said that David Turnbull was the best player on the park. Perhaps worth pointing out that even though it was a strong performance across the team I thought Adam Livingstone did very well at left back.

Will be interesting to see how the standards of our U20s set-up fair against an Irish Premier side with fairly recent European experience. Based purely on the players in their squad that I know about - Rhys McCabe, Caolan McAteer, Adam Morgan - you are maybe looking at a bottom half of the Championship level for Sligo. Hopefully a few of our guys can use this as a chance to advance their claim on a first team place.

We have three winnable matches coming up and we need to pick up a decent tally in these upcoming games because it gets a lot harder after that - Rangers, Celtic, Hearts, Aberdeen etc. St. Johnstone aren't much better than us and have conceded 13 goals in the last three league matches. They have also struggled to score goals, 5, excluding OG's and penalties, in 8 matches. Another 1-1 draw seems the most likely result but we need to see a much better performance that the Livingston match.

The problem now is that Turnbull should have been brought into the team when we were in better form or playing lesser opposition. Now, if we do turn to him, he's being brought in at the worst possible time to introduce a young player. You can't reasonable expect one young player to turn around a team that is massively under performing all across the park, has won 1 league game out of 8 and seems to be in a state of disarray. You need experienced players to guide young players through the game, not the other way round. Guys like Turnbull should have played regularly in the League Cup matches and then been brought off the bench for league matches when there was less pressure on the team. Of course THAT didn't happen because of the short sighted mismanagement of our youth development by someone who's not interested and will only throw in youth in desperation when his own neck is on the line. But it's not all Robinson's fault. The people behind him need a sharp slap to the side of the head as well. It should be part of a Motherwell manager's remit to develop youth. But heaven forbid we have any kind of long term coherent strategy for the club outside of snapping up English non league players, crossing our fingers and hoping two or three coming through the mass import revolving door are good enough to sell on. The people steering the club need to get the finger out. Imagine we'd spent as much time and effort constructing a footballing strategy as we have constructing a social media strategy for a team that's almost unwatchable at present. As for McHugh, having seen the highlights and just how bad the elbow on Gallagher was I think this guy just needs ditched. He should have been sent off at Kilmarnock last week, got away with it, should have been sent off for the elbow, got away with it, and then put in about another 2 or 3 borderline yellows, got away with them, before eventually getting sent off. You can't have someone that stupid on the pitch when you are in our position; then you look at the goals he sold recently at Dundee and against Hearts one of which resulted in a team mate being injured, potentially seriously, but luckily not. You'd think when he put himself out of the game for 6 months with another ridiculous challenge it might have knocked some sense into him. And for Robinson to come out and say it was a soft sending off, well that's just proof that the guys in charge have stopped watching matches and are seeing what they want to see.

I just don't buy this budget argument. One of my consistant criticisms of Robinson that is he has brought in poor quality fringe players yet not used our own youth players. That in itself is a huge waste of money. Guys like MacLean, Hastie, Maguire, Turnbull, Livingstone, Scott are being paid by the club and in some cases have been ready to step up for two years now but aren't being used when we are also paying to bring in guys like George Newell, Ellis Plummer, Liam Grimshaw, Deimantas Petravicius, Stephen Hendrie, Aaron Taylor-Sinclair, Liam Donnelly, Alex Gorrin, Christian Mbulu .etc, who are hardly ever going to play and don't add anything to our squad when they do (or did). Put together all those wages of all those youth players and all the fringe players brought in (plus agent fees and the other expenses involved in 'free' transfers) and you don't come to the conclusion that our spend on players has been at all financially efficient. We are spending a lot of money on players to virtually no effect on the teams play, so if debt repayment is keeping us down why are we so wasteful with our present player budget? Then you can also point to us having multiples of certain types of players while lacking completely other types of players so there is no balance and a tactical inflexibility inherent to the present squad. If we have approximately 50 paid professional players at the club why is Richard Tait been playing out of position for more than a year? There are huge financial inefficiencies in the way we have built our squad and used our resources so it really doesn't cut it for me to use it as an excuse. Instead of being used to excuse it should be seen as a failure.

Read the article properly. Clarke clearly states it's his "first benchmark" with further benchmarks beyond that. Kilmarnock already have 16 points after 8 games so they will hit that benchmark probably by the end of the second round of games and move on to the next one. That's not the message coming out of Motherwell. Survival seems to be our only benchmark. As for us, we have three winnable matches coming up. We need a big performance against St. Johnstone to exorcise yesterday. A defeat to St. Johnstone puts us firmly in a bottom four situation. Then we have Dundee and St. Mirren and after that we have a very hard run of fixtures so it is absolutely imperative we get wins in these three upcoming games or we could potentially be in real big trouble. If we can't do it in the next three games Robinson is going to be under huge pressure. After that we have Rangers, Celtic, Aberdeen, Hearts, St. Johnstone away....

I don't really care about what position we finish. What appalls me is the absolute paucity of football being played. What is going on now can't fail to backfire. Today was close to unwatchable. We'll either get relegated or drive fans away in their droves. Another 1 or 2 like that and people just won't come out, especially as we head into the winter months. And what is the long term plan? We might be a percentile better than two of St. Mirren, Dundee and Hamilton but what then? Another season of this? As it stands we should do the honourable thing and take the F out of MFC.

Can only really give it to Bowman as it was the single moment of any worth.