Ya Bezzer!

The whole striker thing is amazing. We are living in the 21st century when football as a whole has moved away from strikers. It's a legitimate tactic now not to play with a traditional striker. If you even take a look around Europe at the highest level the best strikers are guys like Lewandowski and Kane who, football wise, are from a disappearing era. I know Motherwell isn't a town that is on the cutting edge of modern development but surely fans have noticed football isn't like the 1980s any more.

It will be anathema to most Motherwell supporters to give any praise to Rangers but I thought Rangers were actually pretty good off the ball. Their press was good and they won every aerial duel. They made it difficult to get any flow going and they took Miller out the game. On the ball they are still way below where you'd expect a team with Rangers resources to be but the ugly side of the game they did well. However a lot of Motherwell fans simply won't accept that the oppositions performance had something to do with our performance.

The last manager to actually take us forward was Graham Alexander so maybe you shouldn't be that surprised. A lot of our fans are living in cloud cuckoo land and a lot of them use supporting the club as an excuse to target individuals. The analysis on here in a lot of cases comes down to faces fitting.

St Johnstone have been better recently but they are still vulnerable defensively. You'd imagine the first thing they will do in the next window is get a goalkeeper cos the ones they have are probably the poorest in the league. Upfront Kimpioka and Sidibe are big dangers. It's almost like a bizarro St Johnstone, for so long successful with a tight defence without offering much up front, now the total opposite.

Kaleta was our best player.

Well the manager achieved our first semi final in a while and only the 11th League Cup semi final in our existence. We've rarely ever beaten the Old Firm in our post war history and the only two times we've beaten Rangers or Celtic in a semi final in 40 plus years was a historically bad Celtic team that didn't finished top 2 over a run of about 5 seasons, and a Rangers team managed by Pedro Caixinha that was even worse than this Rangers team. We've over achieved getting to the semi final. Slating the players and manager seems a bit unseemly to me. The odds before this match were Rangers 1.3 Motherwell 8.5. The bookies don't get it wrong very often.

Poor performance. Never really got into the game at all. Looking for a decent start but we hardly had a touch for the first 10-15 minutes. Rangers weren't great but our goal came against the run of play. Midfield was never in the match, not even for a spell did we have any control and I don't think we've won a header in Rangers half all match. Even Lennon Miller was subdued today. You need big game players for matches like that and we don't have them. When Rangers scored 4 minutes into the 2nd half the writing was on the wall. We didn't get it right tactically but lets be honest most of the players froze as players at our level usually do. Just need to put it behind us and try and keep our decent league form going.

Even if that was the case surely exits have to be kept clear? I'll take a look at the thread.

Rangers will always be favourites in these ties but this is a great opportunity to beat them in a semi final. Clement is under huge pressure and failure will see Rangers implode. Missing O'Donnell and McGinn with their experience is a bit of a blow though. Fingers crossed though, it would be a nice boost personally since I have a pretty shitty week coming up!

Was anything made about the massive overcrowding in the South Stand during this game? Not for the first time when hosting Celtic. You'd think this kind of very serious safety issue would be a topic for discussion but I've not seen anything, although to be fair I've not been online much recently.

Good first 20 minutes, we should have taken the lead but we didn't and looked burst afterwards sitting way too deep. Our strikers were 35 yards from our goal line and Celtic's centre halves were sitting 10 yards in our half. You just can't play like that against Celtic as their players will always be better at one-twos, making little triangles, passing, winning the ball and finding space in tight situations. It's only a matter of time. You actually need to play a more expansive type of football and we didn't, at least after those first 20 minutes. First two Celtic goals came from us back pedalling far too much when we should have defended much higher up the pitch. At 2-0 it was game over and basically a training match. I assume as it went to VAR it was a red card but I didn't see anything in it from where I was. Overall a match were Celtic's overall quality, at least in a Scottish context, was clear. With the exception of Lennon Miller none of our players get close to theirs but I still would like to see a more positive attitude in general. When we are on the ball we should be seeing multiple players automatically making runs into the box and it's like maybe one will go, or maybe not. I understand that physically, mentally, technically we don't have top level players but I'd still like to see more attacking intent. Defences are poor in this league, that's including Celtic's, and if you can get that right you'll carry a big threat. Unfortunately we aren't and it's mostly tactically and systemic rather than the actual players.

All our best performances this season have been Robinson up top with two attacking midfielders in a 3-4-2-1. You obviously have a bee in your bonnet about this guy. Robinson was better first half than Watt was second half. If it's a choice between Robinson's shot stats or winning I know which one is more important. The big problem we have isn't Robinson playing, it's having 5 across the midfield with no natural attacker out the lot of them.

Yep. Poor quality match. Dundee have won it and they pretty much did nothing in the second half. Was a bit puzzled by the half time substitutes. To be fair we were poor but taking off the two strikers who had been totally isolated during the match didn't seem like the correct cure for that particular illness. Once again two up front didn't really work and we looked like we did earlier in the season before we brought in Maswanhise to link up the play. So why then take off the two strikers, replace them with another two and continue with a broken system? Overall, a match with not much quality or chances. Tavares should have finished and skied it and I think it was Lennon Miller that got off a long range shot that the keeper did well to save. Other than that wasn't really anything to talk about other than a few 18 yard boxes stramashes. Dundee probably just edged it as they had some momentum in the 30 minutes up to half time and you could say a goal was coming but really today was a big let down, even putting aside the fact that we lost.

11 of Dundee's 13 matches this season have been 2.5 goals or over. If you just count league matches of the 14 matches Dundee and Motherwell have played, 12 of them have been 2.5 goals or over. Might be a bad day to be a goal net.

Just watched the Rangers highlights to see what the fuss is about and......that Hibs penalty is nothing like the one in our game. The Souttar one should be a penalty but I don't think it should even be a yellow card. Casey's was a flat up save! 🤣

I'm going for Miller. Though Liam Gordon was excellent as well.

He was unlucky to get a serious injury right after joining Hull. These things can make or break a career. Just look at David Turnbull who's really struggled after two serious injuries.

Thought we probably deserved the three points even though most of the 2nd half we were fairly deep. Goal we lost was extremely sloppy. Looked to me like Davor just wasn't paying attention, we lose the ball and then from that passage of play we lose a goal. It was especially annoying as St Mirren hadn't really look very good up to that point and we give a goal away that shouldn't have happened and a big confidence boost to the opposition. Fortunately we got the penalty fairly quickly after that. Didn't see it myself but I was told it was a pull. Don't think I've felt as confident with Lennon Miller stepping up to take a penalty since the days of Tommy Coyne. Predictably the keeper was no where near it. After that I felt we were the better team for the rest of the first half. Second started with a bit of a disaster, not really switched on, give away the penalty and a red card. Don't think there is much argument over the decision. Think Ox got a touch to it to get it off the post. That was huge for us as it would have been a very different game if it'd been 2-2 and a man down. Rest of the match St Mirren were on the front foot but we defended well enough and had the best chance of the match with the St Mirren keeper making what looked from the other end of the ground as an amazing save. Though Liam Gordon was excellent today. Wilson looks like an established first team player and Lennon Miller was fantastic and had a couple of good chances to get a hat trick today which would have been a moment. Unfortunate that Ebiye got a start today but then had to come off so early due to the red card.

I must have dreamed he got sent off last week! 🤣 EDIT - OK, he came off injured against Kilmarnock so that must have transformed into a suspension in my head.

I think Olusanya will be suspended so that's good cos I've always been impressed by him when I've seen St. Mirren and he's on a good run of form. Of course we'll be up against three former strikers rather than just one next time......

I don't normally pay any attention to newspapers, and haven't for a long time, but I saw a Daily Record this morning and our win last night wasn't even mentioned until 8 pages in from the back page.

In a frenetic match Lennon Miller was the guy show showed calm, poise and class. It was fitting that hit the penalty with all the attributes he'd shown for the previous 92 minutes.

A game where winning was more important than a good performance. The performance wasn't bad as such but It was a very tight, scrappy match, especially first half. Was crying out for a bit more composure, only Lennon Miller seemed to be able to take a touch and control the ball. Wasn't many chances for either team but I thought Dundee Utd, maybe just edged it in overall play but there wasn't much between the teams. Scored at a great time and looked like a fantastic finish. No chance for the keeper. Second half we started the better team and had a period of pressure and most of the chances but nothing clear cut. About 70 minutes or so you could see us starting to time waste, falling deeper and Dundee Utd started looking likely to equalise. Great save by Ox kept us ahead but it was almost inevitable that Moult would score and it was a great finish to be fair. It's one of those weird things in football that it was almost a relief when Utd scored cos you always felt we'd play further up the pitch at 1-1 than we did at 1-0. Last period of the game was fairly end to end and we always looked a threat at that stage of the match. The guys that came off the bench did well, though Kaleta was good going forward in the latter stages. And we should all know that Ebiye coming off the bench gives you something up top. I'm not 100% on Davor but I thought he had a decent match tonight. On Robinson up top, we are playing a system where we have been competitive in every game, Top 6 in the league and are in the semi final of the League Cup. There's the big picture for those that don't see it.

First of all I hope you enjoyed his goal tonight. Secondly he literally has the best pass completion stats of any one in the squad. Also best stats on dribbling. Thirdly do I really need to explain the game to you? You know as well as I do that just holding the ball up for a couple of seconds can have a big effect on a match. Or just running into or standing in an area, Or putting your foot on the ball and bringing it under control. Or drawing a foul. or an almost infinite number of other actions.

Robinson does a lot of stuff that doesn't get noticed and doesn't show up in stats. I'd like to see Ebiye feature as a starter but we need to find a system and that means experimentation which loads of people on here would probably complain about if it didn't work out like in the Ross County match.