bobbybingo

I can't defend - or understand - him on Bair. Like you said earlier, the guy's a bloody trier, but as much as I believed he deserved a fair crack before being slaughtered, I was as mystified as everyone else when we signed him.

I'm not big on the 'everything used to be better' stuff, but I don't know how any manager could possibly build a decent team at Fir Park (or most other places) these days. They can't go out and buy players now, so it's mostly either cast-offs or kids they're dealing with, and the windows mean they have just 2 goes a season to get it right, if they survive that long. Any promising youngster will be lucky to last 6 months before bigger fish take them and any senior player who has a good season will be looking to cash in on that, as will the board. It is depressing, but we're far from alone.

He might've been better keeping that to himself, but he does like to talk. Kettlewell won't be here that long anyway. The average tenure of managers in Scotland is reducing all the time, and as someone else pointed out on here, our lot are burning out at an alarming rate, irrespective of results. If he's still here in January, I expect we'll be hearing more comments about a lack of funds making the job virtually impossible.

Yeah, the transfer window has removed the chance for managers to correct their mistakes as they go through a season, which makes any mistake that much more costly and no doubt reduced their lifespan at a club. Like you say, it's vital research is done before signing players, but by its very nature, the window causes panic buys like Shaw when other plans fall through.

Fair enough. But can you name one Motherwell manager who hasn't signed at least one useless dud?

The preferred term is journalist.

Does that qualify as parody?

Rice and Slane rejected contracts with us to sign with the Old Firm. I'm not sure how much more the club can do when that happens. McAlear to Norwich, McKinstry to Leeds - again, money talks and there's no way of tying down a player who wants away. Cadden (or his agent) knew exactly what he was doing. Campbell didn't leave for nothing.

Max Johnston is one of them, I suppose. Sorry, but can you tell me who the others are, youngsters we allowed to leave through carelessness and didn't make a profit from, because I can't think of a list.

I'm not advocating doing nothing. There may well be lessons to be learned from other clubs, but the example you gave, Brighton, have spent vast amounts of money to get to the position they're in, so I'm extremely dubious about how well you could adapt their approach on a shoestring budget. The best of our summer singings has undoubtedly been Biereth. Is that the future for us, young, hungry players brought in on loan from teams at a higher level? Probably. That's where someone can earn their corn, identifying targets before they're picked up by our rivals. It would then be up to Motherwell to convince the parent clubs this is the right place to develop their youngsters. It's still a risky strategy and, even it it works, the manager would be required to rebuild the squad on a regular basis, same as now - though not because of failure. You'd obviously need experienced pros to help them. Getting guys of a decent standard in the door will always be difficult, as they're already in the game and will be known to every other club on the lookout. You've been critical of the guys in charge here for not getting a lot/a few of our youth players on longer contracts and allowing other sides to pinch them. Again, which players you're talking about?

Certain ways of going about things could be adopted, but there is one huge difference between recruitment at clubs like Motherwell and clubs from the world's richest league. Both can use analytics etc to identify top talent, but only one can go out and buy the players they want. The other has to hope those targets become available on loan, then compete with everyone else to land them. Brighton's previous head of recruitment, Paul Winstanley, moved to Chelsea last year. Funnily enough, given your comment about us failing to tie up youth players on contracts (do you have the names of the guys you were referring to yet?), the owners are apparently not happy at all with him for failing to tie up Emma Hayes on a new contract, as he was instructed to do. The new guy at Brighton is Sam Jewell, who got the job in February. His previous experience in that role consists of a season at Swindon. He was asked about the difficulties involved in doing that job at a club where money is scarce. He said: "It makes the loan market really important at that level, so you’ve got to have extensive knowledge of U21 players in the top divisions. There is plenty of competition for such players, but we had a certain style of play which meant clubs wanted to send us their players, and we flourished as a result. We maybe played a bit too much football at times for that level, but it was a really important period in my development..." Sounds like the kind of thing we should be doing. But I wonder if Swindon fans agree they "flourished" during his time there. They finished 15th in the league that year. The previous season they were 4th, the following they were relegated. Time will tell how he gets on at Brighton.

Didn't happen the last time we got a draw at Parkhead. What I struggle to remember seeing is us going 11 games without a win. This is not the worst Motherwell side I've ever seen and they're not up against world beaters, so I believe things will change sooner rather than later.

I heard Kettlewell signed a colander by mistake.

Not 7 nil this week, then?

Well overdue a lead and a win then. Nae luck Dundee.

True. Ross County were 9 matches without a win until last night - things change. Did anyone see this horrendous run coming?

Ross County beat St Mirren 1-0. Jordan White.

Looks like Slattery has an outstanding 1 match suspension to serve in the Scottish Cup too.

Yeah, Brighton are smaller than other clubs in their division. They finished 6th last season and sit 8th just now. Sounds familiar. There's always room for improvement - certainly in our summer recruitment - but I suppose it's a bit easier to run successful youth academies and hand pick (and hold onto) players or managers when you have tens or hundreds of millions to throw at it. When you say a lot of youth players have left when they could have been approached about signing a new deal, which ones are you talking about? And did you find an example of a club that's doing these things in Scotland?

It was definitely a question regarding MJC's assessment of Levein.

Surely St Johnstone will dispose of them - I though Craig Levein was a really good manager?

You might want to check that.

Skol don't do crystal balls, but if they did...

He might be moving up a place if Livingston don't start winning sharpish - or, if we don't.....

Why was it of no consequence at all?