Ya Bezzer!

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.

Who can defend that? We are by any objective standard absolutely atrocious. We are a club that's brainwashed it's self into non professional standards. Oh, and McHugh is a complete idiot. Should have been sent off last week, got away with it. He's a reckless, dangerous player who every time he puts his foot in risks a yellow or red. A clown.

Although I'd agree our close season transfer dealings have been poor and the players brought in aren't good enough I still believe all our current woes stem back to the beginning of last season. We won 6 out of our first 10 matches but people forget about many of the performances. Against Kilmarnock and Ross County the team was literally booed off the field at half time, we put in dismal first half displays, were generally given the runaround and were lucky, due to poor finishing from the visitors, to still be in the match. In the 2nd half we improved and we managed to get 1-0 leads with two late penalties, one each match to wrap up the points. The introduction of Allan Campbell from the sub bench turned the match against Ross County. It showed one thing, that Robinson's choices that he'd brought in - Bigirimana, Rose, alongside McHugh were not good enough as a midfield. And as has been proven time and time again ever since, when Allan Campbell is not present our midfield rarely if ever functions. Yet while this was evident to anyone actually analysing the matches rather than just looking at the results nothing was done about it. To this day, more than a year on and two transfer windows past, we still lack quality in midfield. A football team with no midfield will always be destined for disaster. And so it's proved. So how did we win 6 out of 10 then? Our initial success was based on a number of factors - new players, an unusual formation and 'throwback' tactics in an age when 'good' football meant playing on the ground, as well as having the best striker in the league, a good bit of luck and a favourable opening run of winnable home fixtures. However, we were easily figured out after one match, luck doesn't last forever and our striker was injured and then sold. Once teams had played us and adapted, we were easy to counter. The classic example was Aberdeen. Soundly beaten in what will probably be remembered as the best performance of the Robinson era in the league cup, Aberdeen returned the following weekend, changed their tactical approach and completely shut us down and won 1-0. More or less every team did the same after the first round of matches - a fact that saw our form go off a cliff and never really recover beyond a few wins against relegation bound Partick and an end of season kick about against Hamilton in the Bottom Six matches. Here was our second mistake - not replacing Louis Moult. While Main started brightly at the club it soon became apparent that he was no penalty box striker and while he often did good work outside the box the goal return was nowhere near the player he replaced. Yet, again, like the problem in midfield, nothing was done. Another transfer window and Connor Sammon was brought in, a player far too similar to existing players in the squad and a striker with a poor goal return. True, Danny Johnson was also brought in but here was a player with fitness issues and who clearly needed time and matches to adjust and step up a level. He wasn't ready to step right in. So last season while the midfield was not good enough at any point but we could get away with it because we were defensively sound and had a great striker. Then when Moult was sold we couldn't really get away with it a lot of the time because we were depending on not conceding to get anything out of games. If teams scored first they generally beat us. Form suffered badly, goals dried up and our form went into free fall. Finally we get to this close season. Both midfield and forward positions were not significantly strengthen, something that should have been apparent for some time and then disaster happened - the last functioning part of the team - the defence - fell apart. Dunne was injured, Hartley came back from a serious injury and didn't look the same player, Kipre was sold and our best player last season, Trevor Carson, took a major dip in form. So as it stands no area of the pitch is good enough. Carson's poor-ish form may improve but defensively we have been very bad - 14 conceded in 7 league matches and not a single clean sheet. We have exactly the same midfield as last season - a Chris Cadden going backwards at a rate of knots, Rose, Bigirimana, an out of position Tait, and of course ,Campbell, a player that, as good as he is, desperately needs help. The only 'improvement' in midfield was moving McHugh out of it into defence. So while it's tempting to blame Sammon, Donnelly and ATS for the poor start to the season I still maintain that, really, our problems stem back to last season for the above reasons.

I guess I'm saying a lot of Motherwell supporters chose not to support us today - only 500 out of our regular 4,000, never mind the 12,000 that turned out for the final. If you are fed up with us being beaten or turning in very poor performances, then I think that's a legitimate reason for staying away and the rest of us shouldn't get too judgemental about it. Me, I go to almost every match but we've been too bad, too long to really criticise people for not wanting to drop £30 - £40 quid going to a game.

Since he was talking about midfield runners not being matched and since Bigi was getting strips torn off him after the second goal I think you can safely say he'll be one of them. Not sure who's not matched the run for the third goal for Kilmarnock as you don't get the best view looking down the length of the pitch but Cadden had another poor match and really needs benched.

I'd agree that we were competing in the game and the early exchanges were fairly even but I always felt Kilmarnock were the much better footballing team and when we scored it was slightly against the run of play. When Kilmarnock scored the equalizer had been coming for 10 or 15 minutes so I don't agree we looked comfortable at that stage. As for this supposed ability to cope turn round games, we've won 1 match in our last 35 league games from being 1-0 down, that against Dundee. Kilmarnock have done it two weeks in a row. We'll agree completely about the second half. It was noticeably that there was a lot of finger pointing at the goals and with a good 15 minutes of the game left the team had more or less given up going by body language. These are not good signs.

There was 550 odd through at Kilmarnock today. Are those the only ones getting in on Saturday?

Liam Grimshaw is by far the worst player in the squad. Quite an achievement.

Pretty much. If you want to improve a squad you sign players that will displace guaranteed first team starters the previous season. What we've done is replace second string dross with second string dross. Since our actual first team is actually weaker than at the start of last season that policy seems even more bizarre. We have something like 30 first team squad players (if you included Maguire, Turnbull, Scott etc) and you'd be lucky if you could find 10 that are either good enough or tested at this level. As a result there is no competition in the squad, something only compounded by the managers aversion to promoting U20s players into the first team. Robinson has painted himself into a corner with his loyalty to a side that, cup runs aside, was pretty poor in the first place and is poorer now. We brought in Donnelly, Grimshaw and Taylor-Sinclair from the fringes today. You'd think these guys would want to impress during a rare start but alas they did absolutely nothing.

Carson for keeping the score down.

Finished 1-3 but might well have been 4, 5, 6. Carson has made a couple of smart saves and Tait cleared a certain goal off the line. In the end we were well beaten by probably the best team I've seen this season and that fact is what I'm taking away from this match. I keep seeing wee team mentality all over this board, that we can't expect much from a club our size and that the city teams are unchallengeable. Why then are our closest cousins, in terms of size of club, history, support, so far ahead of us? Kilmarnock have beaten Celtic and Aberdeen and are as good as any team in the country. At Motherwell we've let our standards fall drastically. That's a problem that is pre-Robinson but it's only been compounded during Robinson term in charge with atrocious outdated tactics, embarrassing style of football and the complete neglect of our youth system. Things have to change. Kilmarnock showed us today what could be.

Idiotic challenge for the penalty.

Football's a funny old game. We could be 2-0 up or 3-1 down based on a couple of incidents. Been critical of Main's shooting this season but it was an excellent finish. His penalty was very poor though. Feel we've battled away in the match but for me Killie are technical far superior to us and once they equalized the second goal was always going to come. Not too sure about Carson at the first goal, seemed a bit Samsonesque. Second goal Carson was tearing strips off Bigi. With only one goal in it we can still get back into the match but Killie finished strongly and you feel we might have let our initial momentum slip.

Kilmarnock have scored twice in 4 out of 6 league matches and kept clean sheets in 3. We've failed to score in 4 out of 6 and kept no clean sheets. Looks like a 2-0 win to Kilmarnock then. Going but not expecting anything out of this match. As most have said you'd take a point right now. For me the really big match is going to be in two weeks when we play Livingston. A lot of people will probably expect us to beat them and it's guaranteed 3 points. It's not. We are going to have to play well to get anything out of that game too because Livingston are a decent team. They have strengthened their team since we narrowly beat them in a pretty even match in the League Cup, have a new and better manager, and have some momentum going in the league.

We've lost twice to Accies as I remember one at home, one away. Also lost to Hibs at Fir Park. Wasn't at the Cappielow match, I had school and wasn't allowed to go, so I can't think of us actually winning one. I think I can vaguely remember a penalty shoot out in a Lanarkshire Cup final.....but can't remember who won......I might be making that up though!

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Cadden has gone backwards at a rate of knots and played all his best football under McGhee. Robinson doesn't know what to do with him and the player is being ruined. For me he is never a wide player in a million years. He doesn't have the technical ability or the ball skill to perform that role. Frear, a very average wide player, is streets ahead of him in those regards. His attributes, strength, decent pace, energy, point him towards being a box to box midfielder but while I don't think he's being utilised properly Cadden has to take on his own self development. His goal return is pathetic, his final ball has been really poor, and recently he's looked lost and disinterested. While player performance doesn't always boil down to stats Cadden has something like 0 goals and 6 assists from his last 43 league matches and that's just not good enough. At the end of the day you can't put that on the manager and it's down to the player to give himself a shake. Being played out of position is no reason to not be able to cross a ball. If Cadden comes back into the team Rose should be being dropped and Tait should be playing on the right hand side. That way you have a runner (Cadden), a ball winner (Campbell) and a ball player (Bigi) in the midfield three and that seems much more balanced that of recent times. The left hand side position is a problem but you don't sort a problem by causing bigger problems elsewhere so Robinson needs to get thinking instead of sticking with something that's not working. At least he tried something different on Saturday even if it didn't work but we have something like 50 professional players on our books so I'm sure one of them can play at left wing back.

I agree we haven't signed good strikers - even Main and Bowman, while they have their merits are not prolific goalscorers - but we've also been crying out for a genuine attacking midfielder for ages and it has never been addressed. Playing Cadden on the right and Tait on the left has not helped either because we are poor in wide areas and delivery into the box is not good enough. And I also do not believe the team is well coached in terms of attacking play. Watch a team like Hibs and see how the team attacks as a team with 4 or 5 players all running into pre-coached positions. We do not attack in a co-ordinated way. We are coached as a defensive team who scores off set pieces.

Worth noting that McGhee played 1 set of Top 6 fixtures in this 30 matches, while Barraclough played 1 set of Bottom 6 fixtures and Robinson has played 1 set of Bottom 6 fixtures.