Ya Bezzer!

In 20+ league matches under Alexander we've played 3 at the back once so I just don't see that happening unless he's had a complete change of mind. Alexander could have changed the 4-3-3 when he first arrived, he could have changed it at the beginning of this season and he did neither so I think he'll probably continue with it. Kelly O'Donnell - Ojala - Lamie - Carroll O'Hara - Slattery - Goss Watt - Van Veen - Roberts That way you have left footers all down the left, right footers all down the right, seems balanced.

Looked better than Woolery or Amaluzor have shown so far. Plus it adds competition for places.

Only surprise in the return of Roberts is it didn't happen before now.

Two points on the weekend 1) We played 4-3-3 against 4-5-1 and won despite playing quite poorly. I'll highlight this as evidence on my claim that formations don't really matter much at this level of football, or at least are hugely over rated in terms of determining who actually wins a game. 2) Our shots to shots on target ratio last season under Robinson was about 1 in 4. This season (small sample size I'll admit) it's 1 in 2. Big, big difference if you want to dig out results. 20/21 Robinson - 3.82 20/21 Alexander - 3.00 21/22 Alexander - 2.00 I dunno, maybe it's an aspect of the game that Alexander deserves a wee bit credit for.

Literally the best ball Woolery had at the weekend was when he tried to take a touch, his touch was so bad the ball ricocheted up and off his face and then dropped into a good position for him to run on to it. Maybe it was just one of those things that happens to everyone once in a while but when it happens the first time you see a guy it doesn't exactly fill you with confidence.

Kinda surprising that we've only had one Swedish player down the years. Probably up until relatively recently moving from Sweden to Scotland would have been a big step up, although I doubt you could say it's any kind of step up these days.

It looked a bit high to me on the replays. If you go over the ankle I think you are asking for trouble. I think it was at least borderline so it's not something I'm going to get hugely excited about either way, especially since it didn't effect the result.

I defended Alexander last season because he inherited a shambles and he had one job to do and that was keep us up. He's had a transfer window now though and I have to say I wasn't really impressed with the new guys he's brought in. I do think you need to let a team bed in though so come November/December that'll be when you really come to a conclusion but honestly I didn't see a lot of ability out there. You'd hope we'd be better with van Veen and Goss as starters but let's be honest we are scoring off set plays and that's about the sum of it.

Woods would have been great if there wasn't any such thing as crossing in the game. Unfortunately there is. He was quite good at saving penalties as I remember but he was hopeless on high balls and had the occasionally butter hands with shots straight at him. Replacing Dykstra who was excellent on crosses probably didn't do Woods any favours. If you look at his appearances he lost his place about half a dozen times in the team and then came back in when other goalkeepers moved on. Scott Howie was a massive improvement. Unfortunately when he came in the rest of the team wasn't as good.

Grimshaw gave the ball away time, after time after time. To be fair so did O'Hara but that's no star on Grimshaw's report. We have a team that is almost completely bereft of any technical ability. I'm not going to judge some of the newer player right now but on todays performance it was pretty much Kelly, Watt and 9 fit lads. None of them were footballers.

Beautiful day. There was a genuine buzz to be back in the stadium for the first time post Covid. We won. But.... Dundee completely dominated the first 15 - 20 minutes but after that they ran out of steam a bit and the game became more even but you got the impression it was Dundee going backwards rather than us forcing our way into the game. I suppose you could say we defended well enough off the ball because Dundee didn't create much after the opening spell but I thought when we were on the ball we were really bad. So many poor touches, incomplete passes, nothing balls. None of the new guys that started really did much to impress me and Amaluzor and Woolery were pretty much completely anonymous. Van Veen wasn't on long but he at least had a couple of nice touches. Tony Watt was by far our best player. We had three good moves and Watt was involved in all of them. Kelly did want he had to do when needed. The rest of the team? Some big question marks but it's one game. Red card. Didn't scream out a sending off from where I was but I didn't have a great view. Overall we won but the midfield looks worse in the flesh than it does online. McGowan came on and was miles better than anyone we had. 84% pass completion versus O'Hara and Grimshaw in the low sixties.

I was talking to someone up at the club today and they said there are no plans to have PATG in the near future.

Check my record mate. Whether it's defending Murphy and Clarkson from boo boys, being one of about three people in the support to call out Gannon from the very beginning to advocating Turnbull for the first team a year before it happened I'm usually pretty good at seeing the overall picture. And I got a lot of criticism over every one of them. It goes with the turf when you are ahead of the curve. Unfortunately we have supporters that I'll defend dross that sticks around while abusing good players that move on and kids that don't, or barely, get a chance. I get it, your loyalty is admirable. Except it isn't. Who's your best friend? The feckless yes man or the guy that tells you you need a kick up the back side from time to time? Take the last player I had a real pop at, Carl McHugh. Probably the same people defended him and did we miss him when we finally ditched him? Nah, we brought in Gorrin and Gallagher who were both light years ahead of the guy and we went on our best run of performances and results in about 5 or 6 years. Now there's a fact.

Grimshaw scores a 1 yarder and now he's the solution? Don't think so. Listen, he got us the points today but he is not the required level of quality over 5, 6, 7 games never mind a season. There are players that are better than Grimshaw at the club that aren't good enough to base our midfield around. Any decent Motherwell team will have Grimshaw no where near it. Sorry about the pouring of cold water but it's just a fact.

Carswell and Grimshaw have scored on the same afternoon.

Bit worrying that Watt only has 1 more goal this season before he hits his quota.

Cannae keep a clean sheet.

Alexander said before the match he didn't have a full squad due to 'illness and injury'.

That giant pile of programmes taking up real estate just justified it's existence!

Back then we'd get probably about 5,500 for an 'average' game, maybe 7,000 ish for bigger teams like Aberdeen and Hearts and over 10,000 for OF matches although Rangers nearly always brought a bigger crowd than Celtic. Just taking a quick look the famous 1-0 win v Celtic in the Scottish Cup when it was blowing a gale and Tommy Coyne scored the winning header had an attendance of 14,061.

Livingston play 4-3-3 most of the time so if we want to match up....

Have you seen Arsenal lately?

Aberdeen is no picnic.

If you take our last three first pick DMs which I would say are McHugh, Gorrin and Donnelly you'll notice only one of them was an actually midfielder by trade and I know which order I'd rate them in. Sometimes football ain't rocket science. It's a defensive MIDFIELDER. Not a defender IN midfield.

Kelly is the only player of quality we have right now. We concede far too many goals though. I agree you should defend with more than defenders and you have to look at the whole team when we aren't in possession. I've not done an analysis of every goal we've lost this season but certainly the manager should be doing it and we need to look into it, identify the problems and solve them. We will go absolutely nowhere if we can't keep clean sheets against fairly modest opposition.