Kmcalpin

The shine was taken off the result for me as "United were missing four starters through injury in Craig Sibbald, Ross Docherty, Ross Graham, and Louis Moult, United were the better side but could not find the lethal touch they needed." (source: BBC). So, United had some injuries. I'm sure we all feel sorry for them having to field an understrength team.

This has been raised before, understandably, and the reason usually given for not rocking the boat is that the club doesn't want to upset the match commander(s), as they can make life difficult.

I assume he wasn't biased? If he was the Courier will be deluged with complaints.

An unlikely but very important win. 3 valuable points and a confidence booster.

We don't have the players on the pitch to do that, although I agree its badly required. We only have one central defensive midfielder and he's on the bench. Our central defence will need all the protection it can get tonight.

I recall a few years ago when Celtic were our guests. The Celtic fans housed in the South end POD Stand stood up en masse for the entire game. As a result we couldn't see that corner of the pitch. We asked a steward to politely request them to sit down as standing wasn't permitted. The steward consulted his boss, who in turn asked the Police for their take. We were told the Police instructed the head steward to take no action. We were advised to move.

Just what I thought. Its down to policing. The club and stewards have little say. They cannot enforce crowd control measures; thats down to Police Scotland. This is standard policing tactics nowadays from Lands End to John o' Groats. If the crowd is large enough stand back and do nothing - don't antagonise them. Afterwards, for PR reasons they may want to identify a few culprits but then again maybe not. If the club took unilateral action during the game Police Scotland would be most displeased. This situation has gone on at Fir Park, and in other stadia for years. Its nothing new. Might is right. If the crowd is large enough they can more or less does as they want, without fear of interference.

I seem to recall some years ago in an evening League Cup game (it could have been against Accies but I'm not sure) that the Police ordered admission to the East Stand to be stopped as they considered it it to be overly full. In fact it was a hundred or two below capacity. Does anyone else remember that?

Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to Sunday and it'll be a big occasion for us. We've got a fighter's chance, of course, but I'm not overly optimistic and my expectations are limited. I agree about squad rotation but options in midfield and up front are very limited.

A crucial game for us and we must avoid defeat at all costs. We don't want to go on a run of at least 3 defeats. The league is very, very tight this year and we can't afford to rack up a string of losses. Its also important that we score, as thats now 2, on the bounce, goalless performances. Available personnel will be even more limited than normal, with Watt and Gordon now unavailable, and Kaleta injured. I assume that Casey will come back in. Midfield will again be a huge problem, both defensively and offensively and that will put the defence under pressure from the off.

Football is all about opinions. Its funny, I think Wednesday's game is more important to us than next Sunday's. I'd rather Gordon's suspension finished next weekend. We'll miss him against St Johnstone. For me, the semi is all about how much cash we can earn. Teams are now beginning to suss us out and we have no Plan B. Tie up our wing backs and Lennon Miller and they're guaranteed a draw at the worst.

You're on the money. Stam looks to be a player but not in this role. We don't have a player on our books who can play as a lone striker. That points to a recruitment failure last summer. Line up needs tweaking.

The problem is that none of them are defensive players. Davor is the kind of player we need but just isn't up to the required standard. An honest trier though.

I expected us to lose today, but it seems my hope for no red cards was wildly optimistic. Why can't we just get beat? As always with these free hit games it's the next games that are important.

I presume our tactics will be to keep it tight until we'll into the 2nd half and then make some changes. Ap Stam will have a pretty thankless task but the run out will help his match fitness.

Even that isn't enough. We also require an impartial referee.

I get that. However, our problem is that our midfield, even with the likes of Nicholson, Paton, Slattery etc is simply not set up to, or capable of, screening the defence. That immediately puts the likes of Wilson, Gordon and the Ox under pressure. We badly need an Ally Mauchlen, Stewart McLaren, Colin O'Neil, or Steve Jennings to stick their chin out, get in their faces and make tackles 40 or 50 yards out.

Agreed but we don't have the midfielders for that. They will outmuscle us in midfield. No red cards or injuries please. Surely that's not a lot to ask for?

Agreed. Its a feature of modern day policing that tolerance is shown to large crowds, irrespective of behaviour, and they are afforded leeway that isn't extended to other smaller groups. That said we can look back to Helicopter Sunday as an example of how policing at football matches was carried out even then. I was encouraged by the official Police pre match hard line about ticketless fans and Celtic fans in the home stands. In the event they turned a blind eye. Thats what they'll do on Sunday. Thats not a criticism of individual officers incidentally, more of the higher echelons and politicians.

I get where you're coming from, but Stama doesn't seem like the kind of player to leave up front on his own, especially without support. We'll also need pace if we want to break out of defence quickly so should we introduce Kaleta for Wilson? I agree with Sparrow's introduction, if fit, of course.

Is SK's preferred 5-3-2 / 5-3-1-1 / 3-5-2 / 3-5-1-1 working for us? More often than not its some variation of 5-3-2 as we rarely have more possession than the oppostition. Do we have the players to play it successfully? To play that system successfully you need one or two fast wing backs and we only have one in the form of Kaleta (came on in 77 minutes on Saturday), who hasn't featured much. I can't comment on Koutroumbis, as we've never seen him. Such a set up also needs pace elsewhere for it to work successfully and the only other quick players we have are Vale, who is injured long term and Maswanhise (introduced on 61 minutes on Saturday). Another relevant factor is that many of our goals this season have stemmed from set pieces. Anyone who was at Fir Park on Saturday would testify to the chronic lack of pace and laboured pedestrian build up. Now its impossible to be 100% certain of course, given our long, but nevertheless still increasing injury list, but this does point to recruitment failures. Players might not necessarily be poor acquisitions individually, but they have to gel together as a side to complement each other's weaknesses and strengths. At the moment, even with injured players being unavailable we do seem to have an unbalanced squad. The team is unquestionably not greater than the sum of its parts.

Probably but they worked damned hard off the ball to close us down quickly and harass us.

100%. We badly need a physical defensive player who can hold his own in a midfield battle. That would take the heat off Lennon Miller and protect the back line. It might well have nullified the energy of Cameron yesterday. Davor is that kind of player but isn't at the level we need.

You're on the money. We have a number of strikers, with different styles, but none that really work together. So far, they have simply not delivered, for a variety of reasons. Some of that failing is down to a weakened and unbalanced midfield. In short, some of these problems are down to ineffective recruitment. Likewise, we have an unbalanced midfield. We have one lightweight and ineffective defensive midfielder in Davor. Again that's down to recruitment. It was very evident yesterday. Yesterday's game was similar to many of our wins this season. It was very tight and we lost out possession wise. The difference was that we didn't convert any of our few chances and our set pieces were unproductive. Some fine tuning of the midfield and strikeforce required in January. That will probably require a departure or two and some wheeling and dealing

It is a big problem yes, but not the big problem. We also badly lack a decent defensive midfielder hence one reason for the poor possession stats. Robinson is lightweight and can't compete with hulking centre backs. He can't hold the ball up. He might be OK as a secondary striker but the problem with that is that we already have Ap Stam, Ebiye, Vale Watt and Stuparevic for that role. Despite our plethora of strikers, we lack a main striker, someone to take the weight off the others if you will.