Ya Bezzer!

Last Saturday cost me £40. £7 train ticket, £22 admission, £2.50 programme, £4 pie and coke, £5 couple of drinks.

Jeffers missed half the matches in the time he was at the club, I don't think he played a full 90 minutes and he scored 2 goals, only 1 in 8 league appearances. He did OK but we should be looking for better than that, especially if Murphy is going.

I'd give it to Hutchinson. Thought he was excellent although he could have fucked things up late on with a couple of slack passes but we'll put that down to taking a couple of bad head knocks during the match. He's indestructible!

Just back. I'd say it was somewhere between 'sterile' and 'very entertaining'. Nowhere as good as last week but it was away from home and against a decent team. Quite a few have tipped Kilmarnock to go down but based on today I don't think they have much to worry about, they look pretty solid and Dayton looks a player, he was ripping us apart at times. I didn't think their forwards caused us too many problems though but it will take them time to find a partnership between Buijs, Hutchison and Heffernan. Overall a draw was probably the right result but we would have won the match if Law had passed to McHugh for an easy tap in. I don't know what he was thinking about and I felt he struggled a bit today. Bell had to make a couple of great saves but overall we struggled to create many chances. I think there was two reasons for that. Firstly we missed Higdon today. There was no one to play off, win headers and ruffle up the defence. McHugh worked hard but he doesn't have Higdon's physical presence and it's ironic that that he was missing today when we probably had more corner kicks than in a long time. I'd maybe suggest that if Higdon is missing it would be better to play Gary Smith who at least has some height and will win high balls. If Murphy is missing then play McHugh, but the partnership didn't really work today, it was too small and lightweight against some big Killie defenders. Second point was that Shiels mentioned before the match that he had a tactical stroke up his sleeve and Killie played a 3-5-2 in the first half which was pretty successful at closing us down. We were outnumbered in the middle and to be fair I thought Manny Pascali sitting just behind the two other midfielders did a really good job snuffing us out in the midfield. So not the greatest 90 minutes following the 'Well but not the worst either. Looks like we'll probably be top of the league for a second week running, kept another clean sheet, and as I always say 'you drop points at home, you gain points away'. A win next week and we are off to a great start.

Yep, which is why Murphy is probably worth half the 2.8 million Utd are going to get for him. Teams pay for goals. But we shouldn't let him go for less than that. As far as I know Murphy is contracted to May 2013 so we don't have to shove him out the door this season if no one matches the valuation.

I've been pretty positive this season. I said the Leeds performance was good, praised the team on Saturday and said that outside of the OF, Hearts and possibly Dundee Utd there is absolutely nothing for us to fear this season. I expect us to finish Top 6 this season and I'm usually much more cautious. I'm even going along to Kilmarnock this weekend, my first non Scottish Cup/League Cup away match for about 12 years. I wouldn't be doing that if I wasn't upbeat about the potential of the team this season, especially since I'm not exactly flush with money right now. But if you are asking me if Humphrey and Law are going score 10 goals each, then, realistically that is not going to happen. They aren't going to score 10 goals between them most likely.

I think McCall would need to have some kind of tangible success before he was offered the job at Rangers. Right now he doesn't have the credentials, although I'm more than happy for him to go at the end of the season if we have some silverware in the cupboard! Anyway if McCoist fails, and I think people are jumping the gun a bit on that score, most likely the support would move away from the idea of having an 'old hero' as manager and probably be looking for a sort of Dick Advocaat appointment.

Do you think Rangers fans will be 'happy' if they sign Jamie Murphy? More than likely it would cause more unhappiness that they weren't signing big enough targets. Anyway with Jelavic, Naismith, Lafferty all likely to score 15+ goals this season they aren't crying out for a forward player. They need a top quality midfielder, their central midfield is currently Lee McCulloch and Maurice Edu and there is the problem in a nutshell. Most importantly it's highly unlikely Rangers would offer the sort of money we should be looking for from a sale anyway. Murphy shouldn't go anywhere for less than 1 million, the Rangers valuation is supposedly £700,000 and they will come in lower than that.

Some people tipped Killie for relegation but I can't see it. Good goalkeeper in Cammy Bell. Some experience at the back if not great. Look good in midfield with Dayton, Kelly, Harkins. Difficult to tell how potent they will be up front. Ben Hutchinson doesn't have much experience and they have still to bring in Danny Buijs and Paul Heffernan to the line up. Heffernan has a decent enough record in the lower English leagues and Buijs has played for some big clubs in Holland. It's a bit of a cliche but it will be won or lost in midfield by the looks of it.

His goal made Lasley's look ordinary. He was substituted with Garry Hay coming on, was it an injury, 'protecting' a young player or simply a case of putting on an old experienced campaigner for the last 20 minutes?

That's £300,000 more than the article the day before linking him to Rangers. If his value keeps going up at this rate we could be rivaling Man City as the richest club in the world. I half suspect a lot of clubs are looking at David Goodwillie and Jamie Murphy is sort of a 'if we don't get him, we'll go for him' deal. If Goodwillie gets a transfer in the next couple of weeks I'd expect serious bids to come in for Murphy rather than just the speculation we are seeing at the moment.

Humphrey is terrible in front of goal, almost the first thing he ever did in a Motherwell shirt was balloon a good chance over the bar. He did score a good one last season but I think that was the law of averages taking effect. Can't see him getting more than 3. Nicky Law has hardly been proficient in his career so you would have to say you can't see him getting any more than say 5, and that's if he has his best season ever. Higdon and Murphy both have potentially 10 - 15 goals in them but I don't see both of them getting 15, I'd expect one around 15 and the other to get around 10. So in our front four I'd say we have about roughly about 30-35 goals which would mean we would have to get 15-20 goals from elsewhere which is a big ask. You'd really be asking someone who hadn't previously scored many goals to get 6 or 7 and I don't see anyone doing that.

I'd like to check this fact myself to see if it's true because part of me doesn't believe it but if it is true then that just shows you how important it is to have lots of players chipping in with 2 or 3 goals each because that season only Foran and McDonald scored more than that in the league (7 and 15). EDIT - OK seems to be true but in the Malpas season we scored 7 penalties and had 1 OG. In the Brown/McCall season we scored 5 penalties and had 2 OGs. So Malpas didn't scored more goals in open play!

Craggs was dropped because Gannon was insecure to the point of having googly eyes spinning round in his sockets and because he had an obsession with youth to the point of cuckoos coming out of his ears. Last I heard he was out the game and chained to a boulder.

Sadly, I think you are right. I'd be very pleasantly surprised if he is still here when the transfer deadline comes. Another season at Fir Park would put him in good stead but I think he is already at a different level from 95% of the players in the SPL.

Good overall team performance so hard to pick one. Have to go for Hammell though.

A couple in Largs. Great first half. I thought we were brilliant at points. Inverness didn't look to bad going forward either and they had a few chances (Foran should have put them 1-0 up) but we could have scored 5 or 6. Humphrey, Higdon, Murphy and Law caused them all sorts of problems and Hammell played a stormer. Second half we took the foot off the pedal a bit and Inverness kept us pinned back a bit without really causing too many problems. Things were petering out when Las hit an absolute fizzer. If the net wasn't there it would probably still be going. A good overall team performance, at times very good. I was optimistic before the match and actually forecast a 3-0 win and I'm still optimistic. I just hope we can keep Murphy, if we can I'm very hopeful of a great season.

Couple of weeks ago I would have said St. Johnstone but I think they have brought in enough players to stay up. Kilmarnock are a big question mark this season. They have lost so many players and brought in so many unknowns its hard to tell what they will go. Could be Top 6, mid table or relegation. Actually if I was a Hibs fan I'd be really worried, especially if they take a tanking tomorrow and they start the season with all the pressure of last season back on them. I don't expect Calderwood to be there much longer but if they stick with him that could be a very big mistake, they should have let him go when they had the chance to get some compo for him.

Got a chuckle.

If you can't be optimistic for the first match of the season.... Motherwell 3 (Murphy, Law, Higdon) Inverness 0 Oh, and a red card for Tokely!

I'd vote for B but to make it truly retro we should play with black socks, a la League title winning side.

Jordan Halsman did well on Saturday against decent opposition, he played most of last season in the lower divisions on loan and he's 20 years old, hardly a wet-behind the ears kid. I'd like to see guys like Jordan Halsman get a chance this year. If they aren't good enough bring someone in in January but I think we should be giving them that chance. Robbie Neilson? Never rated him, in fact I'd say he's one of the worst players to get a Scotland cap in recent times, which is saying something. Kirk Broadfoot. Gets stick from fans but he's a good SPL player and he'd walk into our 1st XI. If he did leave Rangers he wouldn't be coming to us though.

Inverness are operating with a 19 man squad right now so they don't have a lot of options. They've lost Rooney who scored a third of their league goals last season and was the second top scorer in all competitions after Kenny Miller. He'll be a big, big loss. They have replaced him with Gregory Tade, who's been one of the best players in the lower leagues for a few seasons now so it will be interesting to see if he makes the step up but you can't see him matching Rooney's 21 goals. They have also lose a lot of their experienced players that had been there for ages like Munro, Russell, McBain as well as Chris Hogg, Chris Innes, Dani Sanchez and Eric Odhiambo. Aaron Doran who did quite well for them last season returned to Blackburn from his loan. In fact they only have three players that scored 2 or more league goals last season. Ritchie Foran and Johnny Hayes, probably their best players, and Shane Sutherland. Wouldn't be surprised if they bring in someone before the match because they look quite a bit weaker than last season at the time of writing. You can't afford to take things for granted but for me we look a bit stronger than Inverness and we are at home so, fingers crossed, we can start the season with a win.

Higdon makes John Sutton look like a speed merchant but he did OK holding up the ball and flicking things on. But if you are expecting him to sprint away from defenders forget it.

The strip yesterday was cracking. Better without a sponsor but even with one it would be our best strip in a long long time.