steelboy

more ridiculous than you commenting on the form of stevie hammell over the past five years when you've barely seen him play?

it comes across as more of an ego trip, making the team sit down and watch his greatest moment on dvd. add that to jimgannnon.co.uk, the fact that's he's in love with a 4-5-1 that doesn't suit the players we have, him constantly going on about winning fair play prizes and passing football without ever acknowledging that that's what we've been doing for the past couple of years and his determination to play the youngest team possible (most likely to enhance his reputation as someone who develops young players) and i think we could be dealing with someone who is as much of an egomaniac if not more so than mcghee. i've been at 8 of the 9 games so far and it's been on the whole very positive the guy isn't the messiah and there are still some question marks around him.

we should be aiming higher than playing like stockport county. if we're trying to emulate any team it should be us two years ago.

is no one else disturbed by the fact the players have been watching dvds of stockport?

i've got a team of vietnamese who take care of all of that.

i've heard from someone who does work at fir park and knows the groundsman well that the pitch could be quite bare this winter due to the grass not being properly established. the technicalities of growing grass were lost on me but the jist of it was it could be poor this winter but fine after that. whatever happens it won't be as bad as last winter.

that should be as much of a worry for us as for him, probably more so. there are about a dozen players in the squad who's contracts are up before next season so bringing in a good amount of money for mark could be vital for another summer of rebuilding.

any word on how the pitch is expected to fare during the winter? i've heard varying opinions.

i've thought that's he's looked lost in midfield and that as a left back is one dimensionaly defensive. he was superb playing at sweeper for two seasons full seasons and eventually got a bit of form back during our good run of form from xmas last season. i think that's where we would get maiximum value for him, if you were looking to the spl for a holding midfielder next summer coke or gomis would jump out well ahead of reynolds and at left back paul dixon or stevie smith have much more going for them. he has already attracted a lot of interest at centrehalf/sweeper so teams must think he's alright there.

reynolds has one more season after this one on his contract. i don't know him but i know people who do and there is no chance he'll sign a new contract going by what i've heard from them. anyone else think he should be played in the position he previously excelled in to maximise bids next summer rather than be shunted between midfield and left back where he might not do as well?

if we hadn't had a bad spell with injuries last season i think we'd have been comfortably top six and would have probably qualified for europe through the league. right now i don't think we could put out a first XI as strong as we the one we could field a year ago but we probably have more strength in depth now. goalies - weaker - buzz had a great season last year and didn't put a foot wrong at all after the nancy game. ruddy looks decent but a bit erratic and the idea of having to put fraser back in after xmas is horrible. defence - same, maybe stronger - we've got better strength in depth but quinn is a big loss. the key is keeping craigan fit. midfield - stronger - last season it was rare for us to play a midfield full of actual midfielders. this season apart from the uninspiring sight of reynolds in the holding role we look strong. coke looks great and i'd have liked to have seen hughes beside him. jim o'brien is a new man but should be on the right. forbes is a great asset and has real quality but there are questions about his fitness. jennings looks gash and i'd much rather see lasley or fitzpatrick get a chance. humphrey is a strange one and it could be a while before we get any great return from him. slane looks great but i don't it being plain sailing regarding his contract. strikers - much weaker - sutton who is our number one now was the a distant 3rd best striker last season, he probably had his best game for us against killie but then he got dropped. he clearly isn't capable of playing up front in gannon's 4-5-1. jamie murphy has looked bright in all three league games but i'd rather see him in the centre than out wide. mchugh looks class and ready to contribute from the bench. the polish boy looked totally shite on saturday. we've also got mcpake and page who are too old for the u19s and darren smith who will hopefully get a shot when he comes back.

that is a very confusing sentence.

that's true but i'll be happier when i see us go out, put our best team in the most effective formation and stick with it. i thought after the killie game that would happen but the we end up with a mental team selection up at aberdeen and playing the formation that we had been pish with in the previous two games rather than the one that had worked really well.

it wasn't the last 15 against killie, it was from about 50 minutes til hutchison scored. we went from being totally dominant to under pressure and our goal was against the run of play. when you see us play at perth and we're totally rotten for 45 minutes and then 100 times better when we change the shape you have to ask why we didn't start like that. against aberdeen we had a weird team selection and subs and although we played well for the first 70 we never looked scoring. it's early days though and hopefully we'll start to see a bit more consistency soon.

to be fair i don't think we've any chance of us getting relegated. accies look good to do a gretna this year so it should be pressure off all season long. top six could be a possibility as well. hibs and united are bit ahead of the rest and hearts should be even though they could implode. i don't see killie, st johnstone, aberdeen or st mirren being any better than us so why not aim for it?

we were hopeless in the first 45 minutes at perth then when we changed to 4-4-2 we made loads of chances. unfortunately we were wide open at the back because craigan was off even although he had been solid bar a couple of bad passes. against killie everything was going great then we went to the 4-5-1 and let them back in the game for 15 minutes and were very lucky that kyle missed the header. on saturday he dropped sutton who had probably his best game in a motherwell shirt the week before to play the polish striker who was very poor. moving hateley out of midfield was also a strange choice. the double sub also pretty much ended the game for us as we ended up with forbes completely out on his feet for the last 20 minutes and jennings not contributing much. you want a manager to set out a team which gets the best out of his resources. for me both away games were there to be won as st johnstone aren't all that great and this is the worst aberdeen team in years and the fact that we didn't win them has been due to all the tinkering. apart from the old firm there isn't very much in this league to worry about and gannon should be concerned with sending out his strongest side and giving them 90 minutes to win the game. as much as he has done very well he definitely didn't do that at perth or aberdeen. he's a young manager and it's a learning curve for him, things are going well but they aren't perfect.

i've enjoyed the last few months but it'd be daft to suggest everything is 100% perfect. in all three league games we've seen changes of formation that have resulted in massive changes in the level of performance. imo we've been far better than the other 3 teams we've played and if we had played as well we can for the full 90 in all minutes we'd have took maximum. i'm also concerned that the short term nature of all our signings except humphrey plus other players going out of contract at the end of the season will leave us up shit creek again next summer. grading the signings: coke and hateley have been great, ruddy was fantastic in bucharest but has looked a bit shaky since but has done well, humphrey looks like he might have something and could be on a jim o'brien style gradual improvement however jennings hasn't shown anything positive and lukas' performance on saturday matched the reviews from plymouth and huddersfield. two years ago we were all raving about mcghee and the football we were playing and look how that ended up.

whit? he had the most of assists of any 'well player last year and even on saturday he played in o'brien for the penalty claim with a great ball.

more of a european away game type of guy?

not really i took as a fairly uninspired chant from a bunch of people who were either drunk, stupid or drunk and stupid. why give mark mchgee the paedo chant? why not chant it to jim jeffries or lee wallace? i'm like you and i like a bit of atmosphere at the game and saturday could have been a great day for it but the patter was pish. surely for an ex manager that is widely despised amongst a large proportion of our support something more specific and humourous could have been thought up.

if someone was to call someone a long haired ginger c**t and they have long ginger hair and have proven themselves over a long period of time to be capable of some shocking behaviour then that's fair enough how do you identify a paedophile? you can identify someone who has been convicted of it but not all paedos have been convicted or even accused. there were surely far better ways of getting at mcghee but clearly no one had the wit or desire to think of them.

i thought the chants were out of order. not because i care about mcghee's reputation or his feelings but because any argument we may have had with mcghee about his actions in his final months with the club has been lost. after this weekend no one is ever going to look at it any other way than seeing mark mcghee as the injured party and motherwell fans as being scumbags (as far as this situation goes). if anything we've actually enhanced his reputation among the people whose opinions he cares about - fellow managers, journalists, directors and the type of people he is likely to bump into directors lounges. mcghee was motherwell manager long enough to know what section of our support was doing the chanting and there's no way a man as arrogant as he is would give a flying fuck what they think about him. the opportunity was there on saturday to go up and give him a pasting but in the end it was a total failure. the shite tony mowbray chant was funny and more like that would have been ideal. the main chant we got was unfunny, untrue and left us completely open to attack. now we have a situation where when they come down to fir park there will loads of media attention on us and the well boys/baby crew/whatever will swell in number and likely drop in IQ. the same as everyone else i didn't hear any f****n chants but for a group of people who spent 90 minutes making false claims about an individual to complain about someone making false claims about them is a strange mixture of funny, sad and pathetic.

on saturday hammell had been solid defensively and jim o'brien was running riot down the left. then hammell goes off and we remain solid at the back but o'brien falls out the game as reynolds doesn't particularly want the ball when we're playing it out of defence and isn't very effective when he gets it. reynolds' are his athleticism and intelligence, not his skill with his feet. as someone else said if we want to shut up shop against a particular winger then shove reynolds to left back. but for our average game we need some creativity from at least one fullback and hammell is far more likely to provide it than saunders, hateley or reynolds.

that's a relief. i was a bit worried you might have known some of my darker secrets. see you soon fatley.

say whatever you want. your cousin has come on and has defended mcghee being called a paedophile. why? edited cause i forgot to call you fatley