Ya Bezzer!

Great point supported by facts.

Are you saying not winning a cup is an automatic sacking offence for a Motherwell manager? What exactly is the point you are making? The risk of dumping Alexander is obvious and shouldn't really merit a question.

We've won 1 out of our last 15 European matches and that was at home against Glentoran who caused us all sort of problems until they had a player sent off. Scottish teams don't compete in Europe because they are crap. That's a depressing fact but it's not what we should be defining the club against. I don't mind if we fire Alexander and bring in someone better. But I think our fans need to think very carefully about that. Alexander has a 7th and 5th place finish in two seasons. Are you really that confident that the next guy does better? With this squad of players? With our finances? In our league? What if the next guy does worse? What if he gets us relegated? Fans need to give it a break with the moronic raging two games into the season in a competition that we pretty much had no chance of going further than qualifying rounds.

The league campaign should always be the priority. It's those 38 games you measure your season not a couple of Europa Conference matches in July. If we need to hold off, that's what we should do. Tonight, I think it's possible we can turn it round tonight and extra time and penalties might well be the outcome but I think the most likely result is we will go out. Maybe 60/40 or something along those lines in favour of Sligo.

Obviously Rangers and Celtic at the top. I think Celtic have that bit more consistency and Rangers squad is far to big at present which can cause problems. I think Hearts will probably be third again but I can see them going backwards. Their form in the second half of last season was poorer than the first and their performance in the Cup Final (and at FIr Park) was pretty dreadful. They are nothing special but their home record will probably clinch third. I'd expect Dundee United to do relatively well again and finish Top 6. That's the four I'd definitely expect to be Top 6. Bottom three will be between St Mirren, Kilmarnock and St Johnstone and I think it will be St Johnstone that will finish bottom. If it hadn't been for Callum Hendry they would probably gone down last season and he has moved on. I also think Davidson's behaviour as manager was pretty erratic under pressure and their squad has an injury prone/past their prime look about it. Their goal scoring record is terrible over the past few seasons and they depended on a defence that has mostly been dismantled now - Rooney, Kerr, Clark, etc. The rest of the teams will fight it out for the bottom Top 6 and top Bottom 6 positions and it's hard to determine any order right now. Aberdeen did well in the league cup and their are all sorts of positive news stories coming out but exactly the same thing happened last season when Scott Brown was going to lead them to glory. They had a very weak group in the cup and I think they will find things tougher when the league starts up. Hibs were terrible last season and don't look to have improved much. Livingston are a very well run club with a good manager and surprisingly excellent recruitment history for their size. I think they will be fine. Ross County will probably finish bottom 6 but I think they will finish above the bottom three. Then we have us. I'd expect us to finish somewhere between 5th and 9th.

Lamie was a bomb scare last night. Sligo went straight through the middle of the centre halves with ease about three times last night.

Well when you have a street march before the match you are going to attract a certain type.

Some 'Premiership' standard results this season so far. Hibs 0 Falkirk 1 Greenock Morton 1 Hibs 1 Partick 1 Kilmarnock 1 Livingston 1 Inverness 2 Ross County 1 Buckie Thistle 1 St Johnstone 0 Annan Athletic 0 Queen of the South 2 St Johnstone 2 St Mirren 0 Arbroath 1 Airdrieonians 2 St Mirren 0 Motherwell 0 Sligo 1 I said before the match I didn't have much confidence having seen us struggle against Glentoran and Coleraine, both poorer teams than Sligo, and us with better personnel then. Then you go and look at other Scottish results in Europe in recent times like Kilmarnock being eliminated by Connah's Quay or Hearts going out the Scottish Cup to Brora Rangers or St Johnstone going out to Kelty Hearts and the penny should start to drop. From 3rd down our league is trash. 'Premiership' standard is virtually a meaningless phrase. There is no standard in the premiership.

The only outfield players that get pass marks from me were Morris and Maguire.

Well it went as expected. Fans can go on about Alexander or this or that player but here's the absolute truth here. The team that's fifth in the League of Ireland came to Fir Park and not only deservedly beat us, they looked better than most of the teams we played last season. As I've said for some time the overall standard of Scottish football and the Premiership is very low and no one should be surprised about what happened tonight. Sligo would most likely beaten St Mirren, St Johnstone, Livingston, Hibs etc as well. This probably won't be a popular opinion on here but the rest of us live off the Old Firm. Without them our league set up would be on a par with the League of Ireland. Maybe worse because they probably aren't completely deluded about the level they are playing at in Ireland. You can sack the manager and bring in 22 new players but nothing changes until we tackle the fundamental failures that have plagued Scottish football for 30 years and are getting worse as every season passes.

Looking forward to the match, so begins my 36th season as a season ticket holder! If you've been paying attention to the League Cup we've seen loads of teams in our bracket not doing very well against lower league teams. Start of the season fitness is definitely part of that but I also think the standard of the Premiership teams has never been lower, hence the gap in quality is smaller and the lack of creativity at the top level means lower league sides can defend quite comfortably against 'top' level teams. St Mirren, Hibs and St Johnstone are all basically out and Livingston and Ross County haven't had it all their own way either. Sligo being well into their season will make that fitness factor even more acute. Van Veen missing (most likely) is also a blow. We literally don't have a player in the squad with 10 league goals for the club but Van Veen was the closest. I'll be looking closely at Spittal and Morris to give us the composure on the ball we lacked last season. and what they add going forward. Hopefully we get off to a good start and an early goal would settle everyone down. However if it doesn't come I'd like to think the support can get behind the team. Anyway, time to board the rollercoaster once again....

I was listening to Radio 4 one day and they had a statistician on and he said every team should be 3/1 every time. That's what the actual odds are. When bookies offer 1.5 or 2.0's they are ripping the piss. The whole thing is statistically fixed so you literally cannot win, at least in the middle to long term. I make a £1 bet every day, mainly just to research teams around the world and keep up to date on football, and this season I won the first eight, lost the next three and I'm back to exactly where I was in terms of balance. Yep 8/3 win ratio and I'm even stevens. It's a complete con, play for fun, sure, but never ever think you are going to actually make money.

There are guys out there that are 20 minutes at 0-0 away from losing the plot - at the manager in particular. Like I said some of the vitriolic abuse online before the season has even started is genuinely dispiriting. Last season on this very forum against Livingston we had posters saying they hoped we lost a match that had the potential to get us Top 6. Crazy. Even before that we had the extraordinary scenes at Fir Park when fans applauded Stevie Robinson, who left us in a terrible state and on the brink of relegation, and at the same time booed and screamed abuse at the current Motherwell manager that had just horsed Robinson and his St Mirren side. You couldn't make it up. I know society in general is going to hell in a hand basket but it seems like our a significant section of our support is part of the vanguard. We are a small self financed club with no outstanding talents on the roster. Like I said we need to manage our expectations. That's not to say we shouldn't try to win or try to play good football but there has to be some kind of realistic expectation of where we are.

Far stronger? If you transferred all our players to various Irish League sides how many of them do you think would be stand out players in the League of Ireland? Probably not very many of them. I'd love to be proved wrong about this tie but I think we have to be very wary and not under estimate them but perhaps most importantly not overestimate ourselves. Scottish clubs in Europe, outside the Old Firm, have generally had an atrocious record. Our own recent record against Stjarnan, Glentoran, Coleraine and Hapoel Beer Sheva doesn't give great confidence, especially since we had better players in those campaigns than we do now. I just have a fear that Scottish football fans being what they are, we'll turn up on the night expecting to roll this team over easily, and if we don't score early, and discover the gap between us and them isn't as big as they though, the crowd will get on the teams back. I was Instagram the other day and some of the abuse the manager and players are getting on there before the season has even started is ridiculous. I don't want sound like a prophet of doom cos I think we are 65 - 70% shots to win this tie but it's very possible it could be a close run thing and it's certainly not impossible for us to lose it. We need to manage our expectations but I suspect the majority of our supporters won't. They didn't last season so why would that change?

Think everyone needs to calm down and concentrate on beating Sligo first!

Knowing Turkish teams I hope we got the money up front for Woolery!

Surely the goalkeeper interest is due to PJ Morrison going to Falkirk? Scott Fox, in my opinion, was never a very good goalkeeper in the first place. At his age and with his lack of game time you'd hope we'd be looking around for another keeper. We don't want to have another situation akin to a couple of seasons ago where we get an injury and then only have 1 first team level goalkeeper available.

For me he's alway been better coming off the bench.

Killie were given the runaround for most of the match and Donnelly was the first player subbed. Not exactly a confidence builder for Kilmarnock. It's actually interesting just how poor the Premiership teams have been in the League Cup so far. The only team with two wins is Aberdeen and that was against very low level sides.

We had a terrible record against Hearts through the mid eighties to early nineties. I don't know exactly but I think it was about 15 games or something without a win, or maybe 1 win. Something like that anyway! I'll maybe look that up later on. EDIT - 2 wins in 36 between 1983 - 1993 and a run of 0 wins in 15 between 1985 and 1988.

Walter Kidd, Brian Whittaker, Gary Mackay, Kenny Black etc. Then add in cheating wee c*nts like Colquhoun and Robertson.....

Isn't that just modern football though? The centre forward pairing is no more unfortunately and I'd rather 'anywhere in the front 3' than 'big guy that holds the ball up and flicks things on'. That seems to be your choices these days.

Imagine last years Aberdeen minus Ramsay, Ferguson and Ramirez. Ouch.

Robinson - Carson - Gallagher - O'Hara start the season with a 0-1 home defeat to Arbroath in what one Buddy at the match described as "One of the worst St. Mirren performances I've ever seen".

That match was a great result but a terrible game. Was played in gale force winds making it almost impossible to play any football. Kinda similar to the Hibs match last season.