David

If the argument is that every member of the squad should be capable of genuinely challenging for a starting place, then I'd agree that's the ideal. I'm just not sure it's realistic for Motherwell. We're not Celtic or Rangers with the budget to have two established Premiership-quality players competing for virtually every position. There will always be levels within our squad. You'll have established first-team starters, players who are genuinely competing with them, experienced cover, younger/developing players and a few who are essentially there to provide depth when injuries, suspensions and fixture congestion hit. The question with someone like Wilson or Ross isn't "would I want him starting every week?" It's "is there value in having him as the 18th, 20th or 22nd member of a Motherwell squad?" Those are very different questions. But important questions. Because if we send Wilson packing, we'll need to find someone happy to be the 18th, 20th, or 22nd member of a Motherwell squad. And most likely it'll be someone on the same level as Wilson.

I mean, feel free to scroll right past if long posts aren't your thing. Or even if my particular posts aren't your thing. God knows I scroll past plenty on here without passing comment. It's a football internet forum. Discussion and opinions, arguments, debates, all that, is exactly what it's for.

As you know, I've never really been arguing that Wilson or Ross are going to become first-team regulars. They might, they might not. My point is that a club like Motherwell needs a squad, and not every player in that squad is going to be of the standard where we'd happily have them starting 30 Premiership games a season. If they were, they probably wouldn't be squad players at Motherwell for very long. Wilson is a decent example. He's 21 and already has a decent number of Premiership appearances. He made a chunk of them for us in 2024/25, got into the Scotland U21 squad and earned another contract. Then JBA arrived and brought in Longelo. Longelo hit the ground running from what I can recall, scored against Rangers and Hearts early on? And went on to have an excellent season, with nine goals in all competitions and a Player of the Year nomination. There's a reason why we're often talking about him potentially being sold on. Wilson went to Raith shortly after Longelo established himself, and JBA actually explained the thinking at the time. We'd added competition in Wilson's position and the club wanted him getting games elsewhere rather than sitting around waiting for the odd opportunity. Does Wilson's failure to completely nail down a place at Raith raise questions about how far he's progressed since that breakthrough season? Absolutely. I think that's fair. But there's quite a jump from that to saying he's clearly not good enough to be part of a Premiership squad. Those are two different standards. Luca Ross is even younger. He turned 20 last week. At 18, he went to Annan, made over 30 appearances, started 20 or so and played every minute of their four play-off matches. We considered that loan successful enough to give him another contract. Last season he made 14 appearances for us if I recall. Again, maybe he doesn't ultimately become a regular. Most academy players don't, sadly. But Motherwell aren't trying to assemble 22 players who are all established Premiership starters. We couldn't afford to do that even if we wanted to. You need your better players, then you need competition for places, experienced cover, younger players developing underneath them and players who can come into the team when injuries, suspensions and fixture congestion dictate it. That's particularly relevant now that we're trying to deal with European football on top of everything else. We've seen the chat of injuries mounting up and it's only mid-August. The obvious downside is that when you make eight changes at once, you're suddenly asking a lot of players who normally perform supporting roles to effectively become the team. That's completely different from Wilson coming into an established side because Longelo is injured, or Ross coming in alongside nine or ten regular starters. That's really all I was getting at about Sunday. Wilson and Ross were poor. So were plenty of others. Nobody is suggesting they should be immune from criticism because they're young. I just don't think a bad performance in a heavily rotated team establishes that they have no value as Premiership squad players. Maybe ultimately they won't be good enough even for that role. That's possible. But there's a fairly substantial gap between "I'm not convinced this guy will ever be a first-team regular" and "this guy has no business being in Motherwell's squad." For a club operating with our resources, that distinction is quite important I think. That's generally how it works from what I know. There would be no point in having all that technology, and the players running around with vests on under their shirts with weird boxes attached to them if we're not going to use them I guess. It truly is a backroom team I think. Expertise across the board. But the manager makes the final call, and the buck stops with him. So he is responsible for the loss, but there will be reasoning behind his choices I'd think.

There were, what? Eight changes to the team? When you change that many players at once, you're changing partnerships, movement, communication and most of the structure around them. A young/fringe player coming into a settled Motherwell side alongside nine or ten regulars is a very different proposition from several of them being thrown together at the same time. They can still be criticised for playing poorly, of course. That's football. But I think some perspective is maybe needed there.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, we're in danger of oversimplifying what goes into these types of decisions. It's not simply a case of looking at the fixture list and deciding to rest half the team because there's a European game coming up. From what I gather, the players are monitored pretty closely. The staff will have data on how far they've run, how much high-intensity running they've done, sprints, accelerations, training loads and how all of that compares to their normal levels. Then you've got the medical side. A player can be perfectly fit to play but still have a bit of tightness or be carrying a heavier workload than normal. The advice might be that he's fine for 30 minutes, fine for 60, or that another 90 minutes probably isn't a great idea. They'll also look at recovery, how the player has been training, how many minutes he's played recently and his own injury history. A 21-year-old who has hardly missed a game through injury might be treated differently from a 30-year-old with a history of hamstring problems. The opposition (and the playing surface, no matter how much some people like to dismiss it) comes into it as well. The coaching staff will have analysed them and worked out where they think they can afford to make changes without weakening the team too much. So the manager might effectively be getting told that Player A is absolutely fine, Player B has played a lot but isn't a concern, Player C is showing signs of fatigue and Player D is carrying a minor issue that could become a bigger problem. He then has to make the decision. That's particularly relevant for a club like ours when we're playing Thursday-Sunday-Thursday and have been doing that for several weeks. Some players could end up playing four or five games in a fortnight if you just keep putting out the strongest XI. That doesn't mean rotation is always the right decision. Managers can still get it wrong. You can change too many players, lose the rhythm of the team and end up going out of a competition you had a decent chance of progressing in. Teams far bigger with managers far more experienced than us have slipped on that banana peel before. But I do think it's worth remembering when we see a team selection we don't like that the manager isn't working with the same information we are. We're looking at the names on the teamsheet. He's looking at the teamsheet plus all the physical, medical, training and opposition information behind it. We can argue with the decision he eventually makes. But there's usually a lot more behind that decision than simply "Europe is more important, so we'll rest a few players."

I don't expect us to get anything from either tie, but hopefully we can give a good account of ourselves and at least make a game of it. Get a good result at home and who knows what can happen?

The manager, obviously. He's the guy who picks the team. 100% agree. I hold the Scottish Cup much higher than the League Cup for sure. The League Cup has been won by St Mirren, St Johnstone and Ross County over the past ten years or so. I honestly had to look that up. It's a competition that means next to nothing for me when we have a European run going. Wait, it wasn't getting to the League Cup final in 2017/18? Or in 2004/05? The Scottish Cup holds a special place in my heart that the League Cup simply doesn't. I value the Scottish Cup win alongside the European adventures far more than any League Cup adventures.

Well, it's quite clear that man who's in charge thinks differently, so there is that.

What if the choice was £1.2 million from 3 rounds in Europe or losing a League Cup quarter-final to Hearts? There are a lot of people assuming we'll definitely lose to Freiburg, but we would have had a real chance to win the League Cup. It doesn't always work that way.

Absolutely not. We've already earned twice as much financially in Europe as we would if we actually won the League Cup. In a season where we aren't in Europe, I'd absolutely agree that the League Cup is a priority, but when we have more lucrative European games, and we currently sit two games away from the actual group stages and the chance to earn millions? It's not even comparable.

Since August 2nd, we've played Sunday, Thursday, Sunday, Thursday, Sunday. We can't keep playing our first eleven on that schedule, it'll result in injuries. I'm fairly sure with the approach at the club just now, and how the manager is known to approach things, that data will have been provided on player fitness levels and will have played a part in his selection. As I said above, something had to give, and the choice was the League Cup game.

No one thinks we're Man City or Liverpool. It's simple squad rotation, and it's something we need to do when we're playing so many games this early. Like it or not, European football is always going to be the priority over the League Cup. That's the reason we worked so hard to actually qualify last season. We've managed to bank over £1 million in prize money so far, and that's not taking into account the tickets sold for home ties and so forth. I wouldn't be surprised if we've pocketed somewhere close to £1.4 million so far in total. Even if we lose to Freiburg, which we probably will, we'll be looking at over £1.5 million. And if we somehow manage to upset the odds and win? You're looking at over £3 million before a group game ball is kicked. So yeah, while the fans may not like it, the manager could have been considered negligent to not want to give us the best chance possible to win that tie. Even if that comes at the expense of losing in the League Cup. European football doesn't come along often, so we need to prioritise as needed. A result against Stenhousemuir would have been nice, but the League Cup is secondary to Europe. Just how it is.

Not an ideal result, but the harsh truth is we're playing games on a lot of fronts at the moment with a fairly small squad available to us. If the manager has to rank the League Cup, League, and European football in order of priority, I know which I would have at the bottom of the list. Europe and the league are more important at the moment. Just how it is.

I'd certainly hope we're spending a bit more on players than we were, and not just because we have money to spend at the moment. It should be part of the model. We have progressed from getting players on a free transfer and hoping to get a million or so for them, to spending a couple of hundred grand and hoping to get a bigger profit margin, and now we're looking at players who cost around half a million and while the ceiling in what we can command in transfer fees is real, we'd hope that spending that half a million means the player is more likely to be worth four or five million in a year or two. It's not an exact science, of course, but it stands to reason that someone valued at half a million with the pedigree that Hodge has is more likely to have a higher ceiling than someone we get for nothing and who doesn't quite have that background. A calculated risk for sure, but hopefully it'll pay off more often than not. And that's not to mention that we are able to sign players on longer deals when we're spending more, rather than a season at a time.

Crazy to think that "retired former player" could easily be Jon Obika. The likes of Arnott, Philliben, Martin etc are all well past the age of being able to take part I'd imagine.