MJC

Yes! Yes! Yes! THAT is a Motherwell FC kit. An absolute beauty!

Cornelius away to Harrogate, official. A shame to see him go but good luck to him. Edit: and now Harry Paton confirmed on a two year deal. My enthusiasm for the new season knows no ends now.

He’ll probably do well for them in the Championship.

Because he’s crippled by injuries and has been almost since he left us over five years ago now. We knew this last August but still took a gamble on him by giving him a season long loan deal which we ended up cutting short in January because he’d contributed very little apart from his presence in the treatment room during his return. No harm to the guy personally but he’s done. We took a chance on him last year and it didn’t work out, so we move on.

Club Twitter saying that Calum Butcher will miss several weeks of the new season after having surgery on his foot. That is a hammer blow for us.

Half expecting a video titled ‘Unleash the Beek’ to surface on our Twitter page to confirm that Obika is our new No.9 for the new season.

That is the best way to look at it. Players and managers will come and go but the club will always be there. No one is bigger than the club, no matter what or how much they contribute while they are with us.

The ‘plus point’ if there is one about this move is that he’s not joining an Aberdeen or a Hearts etc so won’t be playing against us next season. Nevertheless he will be a tough act to follow for any forward players we bring in this summer.

KvV gone official. Undisclosed fee. It was always happening but still gutting to hear it confirmed. Good luck to him.

I can’t believe that anyone who has watched us over the past two years wouldn’t want Liam Kelly to remain with us. He had some poor displays last season but overall he has been excellent for us and saved us from many a potential drubbing.

I don’t know. I’m sure KvV and his agent will be well aware that if for some reason this move doesn’t work out or he suffers a similar misfortune that Moult did with injuries then we will give him a deal. I can just picture it now. August 2025, we are short of striker options and KvV has been touted for a return despite being out injured for months. Every post on the clubs Twitter is replied to with #announcevanVeen. Then finally a video is released, filmed from the top floor of Glassford Tower looking towards Fir Park. We then see a KLM plane is descending towards Glasgow as the tune of “Tulips from Amsterdam” plays over it. Then finally we see what we’ve all been waiting for. It’s the Fir Park pitch with a 34 year old KvV standing there in a Well top and a pair of crutches. The fanboys go wild.

Absolutely nothing. Oxborough hasn’t played a single minute of first team football and Danzaki showed very little when he got his chance and like McKinstry pretty much fell off the scene when Kettlewell took over. Kelly wasn’t great last season, certainly poorer than his previous two, but he also saved us on a number of occasions and more than proved that he is very much a solid, dependable goalkeeper for us. Losing van Veen will be a big blow, losing Kelly at the same time will only add another big blow at the other end of the park.

That would have been a very expensive mistake at a time when we were already well down the road to financial ruin. One ex Rangers player we should have signed during that spell was Ally McCoist when he left Ibrox in 1998 and ended up at Killie. He would have contributed more goals in that team than John Spencer did imo.

It usually is with us, they are something of a speciality of ours.

Nevin being our player/Chief Executive will never not be strange. And I liked him as a player too! His last minute winner against Hearts in a midweek game at FP was a memorable moment. His working relationship with Boyle obviously wasn’t the best, even if they were on good terms to start with. I’m sure he was the biggest vocal opponent to us going into administration in 2002 and he doubled down on that viewpoint last year on the 20th anniversary of that. But, how much of a part did he play in our overspending in the period leading up to that? Who knows? Billy Davies as manager with us was similar to Alex McLeish, albeit without the media darling status. He was an inexperienced manager given a significant amount of cash to spend by our standards and didn’t deliver as much as he should have in the circumstances. That said I was never convinced that the signings of John Spencer and Andy Goram - the two really high profile signings - were completely down to him at that time, even though Spencer was a relative of his.

The club have just tweeted that our partnership with Paycare has ended and that a new front of shirt sponsor will be unveiled in the coming weeks so it looks like we’ll be waiting a while longer to see what our 23/24 kit looks like, and who will sponsor it.

On paper yes and with or without KvV we should have too much for the rest of the sides. But we must be properly prepared and professional when the games come around.

A winnable group in a competition we should be looking to go as far as possible in. Best way to start a season and none of this Europa league pish.

As did I at the time, I was pleased to see him back and glad we gave him the chance, kind of heart ruling head. But unfortunately it quickly became clear that he just wasn’t anywhere near fit enough to make an impact and we rightly cut short his loan.

There’s nothing wrong with having a reputation of being a club that looks after it’s players, but at the same time we are a professional football club, not a charity, so when we have players on the books we need to be getting something in return for us taking care of them. And yes it has worked well for us in the past but over the past decade it has gotten to a ridiculous level of simply signing ex players in the hope that they can somehow recapture their form with us years before and also no doubt with an aim to getting the fans on side. Of the list I mentioned above, the obvious success stories were Scott McDonald, who was still a quality player at our level when he came back, and Stephen Pearson especially during the playoff season. Faddy was excellent in his initial return in 2013 but offered next to nothing afterwards and was clearly done. John Sutton being the other plus point. The rest of them with perhaps the exception of Grimshaw, did nothing for us in their return and three of them (McCormack, Moult & Aarons) barely kicked a ball and were never fit and wouldn’t even have been considered had they not been with us previously. I’ve no issue with us bringing back an ex player if he genuinely still has something to offer us, but I’d like to see us show a bit more vision in our transfer dealings. Instead of bringing back a clearly crocked and finished Louis Moult why not try and find another player who would potentially offer us the same as Moult did when he was younger and fitter? Easier said than done, I am fully aware of that, but surely more productive than our re-signing of Moult last year?

Right so, we DID sign some ex players last season then? Loans count as signings surely? It was actually three if you include Rolando Aarons second ill fated stint with us. If you go back to 2013, in that time we have re-signed (off the top of my head) James McFadden three times, Stephen Pearson twice, Scott McDonald, David Clarkson, Henrik Ojamaa, John Sutton, Ross McCormack, Louis Moult, Rolando Aarons, Liam Grimshaw and Jake Hastie. We also brought back Mark McGhee for a second stint as manager. I don’t know how that compares against other clubs re-signing ex players or employees but that’s quite a list imo.

You don’t say? As I think I mentioned earlier in the thread the people who are going to buy the kits will buy them regardless of what they look like. I just don’t get why we can’t just stick to our classic and traditional kit, obviously with some tweaks here and there with every new kit. You don’t see Real Madrid or Leeds Utd, both clubs with a predominantly white kit, always trying to be out the box and different. They have their identify and they stick to it. I wish we would take a leaf out of their book.

Maybe it is, but it surely can’t be denied that we have re-signed a fair amount of ex players over the last 10/15/20 years, with the last decade and a bit being particularly notorious for it?

I wouldn’t be completely against Steven Hammell coming back in some sort of role in the future, but as a club we really, REALLY need to move away from this culture of re-signing or re-hiring ex players or staff members. It just screams out a lack of vision and forward looking and instead just makes us look like mugs for sentiment. We’ve seen it in the past with Faddy in the several times he re-signed for us. It gets suggested on here and Twitter etc and it ends up happening. You get the impression that we could end up seeing Louis Moult re-join again this summer inspite of his injury issues and failed loan earlier last season. It must be the easiest job advert for scouts. ”The successful candidate will ideally have a sound knowledge of football and scouting operations as well as previous experience of sourcing and identifying potential signing targets, but this is not required as full training will be given. An ability to read social media platforms and identify which popular former player or employee would be most desirable to the support is essential.“

We won’t be moving from Fir Park any time soon unless something drastic happens like a serious fire or an earthquake which swallows the entire ground up. In fairness given our record and luck with things going wrong with the stadium over the years then you wouldn’t rule either out. I love Fir Park to bits and would hate to see us leave it for some soulless Lego style new stadium like Livingston or New St.Mirren Park but it’s been more than showing it’s age for the last 10-15 years now and you wonder how much longer it will/can go on for without serious money being spent on it. Serious money that we don’t have at that.