Ya Bezzer!

If someone has had one too many outside the ground they probably wouldn't be allowed to enter the stadium. If they are already in the stadium and then can have one too many that's the crucial difference.

In England one or two clubs do not represent 50 - 60% of the entire supporter base. Also if you think trouble in one match saw the ban coming then you are misinformed. The 1980 Scottish Cup Final was the straw that broke the camels back not a one off event in drunkeness and violence. I wouldn't envisage the same level of problems if alcohol was sold for limited periods within the stadium, rather than fans bringing in bags of cargo, but I think it would still cause some problems. All it takes is one guy to have one too many.

I pretty much agree in essence with every thing you say here except there are some factual errors. Gannon only won 1 of his last 11 games if you include the 0-3 defeat in the League Cup to St. Mirren. Secondly he did play Reynolds and Craigan together on a number of occasions, actually 7 out of 17 league matches. However Craigan being frozen out from the team more or less coincided with the arse falling out our season, culminating in the embarrassing 6-1 defeat by Rangers. Craigan was brought back after that, for what turned out to be Gannon's last match in charge, the absolutely dire humping at Fir Park from St. Johnstone. Reynolds and Hateley were the only players to start every league game under Gannon.

What are Gannon's stats for throwing away a lead by making completely mental, almost random, personnel, tactical and formation changes when we are dominating the match? I'm guessing somewhere about 50% mark.

I already have to stand up and down about 15 times a match to let people go up the aisle. If they bring alcohol back they might as well take the seats out anyway.

You don't have to an eye for a player to go to an English Premiership club and find two good players to come in on loan. Ruddy and Jutkiewicz were the best players by a mile that Gannon brought in. Jennings was a good player but would any one really say Humphrey, Coke, Hateley and Moutaouakil were great players unmatched by players brought in before or since? Hardly. Bringing on Murphy and Hutchinson who were already at the club and had already made debuts was a bigger plus for Gannon than any of the players he signed.

He's a pale shadow of the player he was last season. He must be carrying an injury. No one goes that downhill in one close season. He can barely run.

Lasley was tremendous today, especially in the first half.

The one he got away with the worst of the lot. Summed up referee Charleston.

First hour was the best football we've played this season. We created so many chances the game should have really been wrapped up. Samson made a superb save and we looked to have a stonewall penalty denied as well by a referee who to put it mildly wasn't very good. As in the Partick match we seemed to tire and drop deep and what should have been a comfortable win became a lucky 3 points. There were various hearts in mouths moments and I think Kilmarnock will be disappointed not to get something out of the game. Good though to see some good performances which have mostly been lacking up till now. Sutton and Anier did well up front, Hutchinson and Carswell defended well and I thought Lasley was immense today.

Got Killie at 5.00 Purely for consolation of course, hopefully I don't win this one!

Motherwell strong favourites with the bookies.

Moore has taken the field this season while Erwin has not. Fair to say Moore seems to be ahead of Erwin in the front player pecking order.

We have a larger budget than Inverness. It must also be harder to convince players to join Inverness due to the location. It's a long commute from central Scotland, never mind England. I still rate Terry Butcher as the best Motherwell manager since Tommy McLean. It was Terry Butcher's donkey work that set up our recent consistent spell of Top 6 finishes. He worked miracles with no money when other clubs were still splashing the cash around, his cup record was superb and he brought in probably the best outfield player we've had at the club in the last ten years, Scott McDonald. His five years at the club were the foundation for everything every manager since then has achieved.

Have a wee soft spot for Roma and Palermo having spent time in both cities. Roma, of course, have the same colours as Motherwell which is nice. Perhaps we can adopt a pink away strip!

He has a good overall record but he hasn't scored in 13 matches for Kilmarnock. Not exactly on form.

I think this is going to be an important match because if we can get some confidence up we have a reasonable kind run of matches that we could take a fair few points from (Kilmarnock, Ross County, St. Mirren, Dundee Utd). Kilmarnock seem to me to be a bit like us in that they haven't got a settled midfield yet, although up front and at the back they seem decent. So far Kilmarnock have scored in three out of four games but never scored more than one in a game, same as us, while they have conceded 5 goals over 4 matches, same as us. Has a 1-1 draw all over it.

I think 'dominated' is a bit strong and I think your 70 minutes is wrong as well. For me the game started to swing when they brought on Higginbotham on 52 minutes. We were already looking shaky when Carswell (who was injured making a defensive challenge just over our 18 yard line remember) went off. The reason we got the full 3 points yesterday was because Partick don't have a penalty box striker. If Kris Boyd or Billy Mackay had been playing yesterday we'd probably wouldn't have got a clean sheet.

We missed Carswell when he went off but the tide of the match had turned before his injury.

I didn't think anyone was outstanding. About half the team was a wee bit better than the other half and in all honesty I could have given it to 4 or 5 players. Carswell and Anier didn't finish so I will rule them out for that reason. Hutchinson, Ramsden kept clean sheets, Sutton got a goal. I'll go for Ramsden.

Scary second half, we were hanging on for the last half hour or so and I'm sure many a finger nail was bitten! First half I thought Partick were quite poor and we were the better team in a half that didn't really catch fire. Second half though Partick were a different side and had us pinned back for long periods and as mentioned there was so hair raising moments. We could have made it a much easier watch if we'd taken one of the various break away changes we had, Lasley should have made it 2-0 and McFadden could have done a lot better on a number of occasions. Not a great performance but happy with 3 points, debatable if we deserved full points from the match.

Undefeated in the first seven matches last season. 3 wins, 4 draws. After that we had a bad spell of 4 defeats in 5 matches but we already had some 'points on the board' and our lowest position in the league was 8th.

You can play well, make a mistake or two and lose the match. Or you can just play poorly making many mistakes some of which are ultimately punished by the opposition. We are closer to the latter rather than the former at the moment. The four matches I've seen in the flesh (Newcastle, Nottingham, Krasnodar, Aberdeen) we've shown virtually nothing. I've also seen two live matches on television and although those performances were better, we made a number of mistakes and created very little in those matches as well. Some posters might either be hysterics or depressives with their reactions at this stage of the season but there comes a point, especially during the first round of matches in a season, when it becomes difficult for teams to get into a different gear if they have stalled over the first 7 or 8 games. We won't have a write off season if Partick beat us at the weekend but we will be one match further down a path that we really don't want to go down.

We're not playing a Partick Thistle side that's spent 10 years in the 1st division. We are playing a Partick Thistle that won the 1st division and has outplayed every team in the SPL that it's come up against so far. The team of 8 or 9 years ago has nothing to do with this one. Some of the younger posters might not have much memory of Partick Thistle at Fir Park but they have always been a bit of a bogey side for us, especially at Fir Park. On the up side though they seem to have had trouble translating dominating the play into goals, they really ought to have beaten Dundee Utd and Hearts and failed to do so. I don't think we can afford another poor performance. First of all if we do play poorly we will probably lose but more importantly I think when you have this many poor performances back to back it is very difficult to get player attitude and confidence up for games as they go into a psychological rut. We need the players to raise it for this one, otherwise that will be 8 poor performances in a row (only the fact that we beat Hibs made the performance palatable) and that does not bode well.

I'm guessing our player budget won't be the problem. We can fairly easily set a budget and stick to it. There are many other running costs though that we have less control over.