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St Johnstone V Motherwell Sat 20 Feb 15:00


Yabba's Turd
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Ripley - Utter shite for that first goal. A bus could have got in that front post.

I heard a few folk say exactly this at the game Busta and seen a few comments on here about it. Watching the highlights last night though casts it in a different light. Spoony whacks the ball directly at Ripley who has it covered.Then the ball takes a swerve to Ripley's right and he is left helpless. I wouldn't blame him for that.

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I heard a few folk say exactly this at the game Busta and seen a few comments on here about it. Watching the highlights last night though casts it in a different light. Spoony whacks the ball directly at Ripley who has it covered.Then the ball takes a swerve to Ripley's right and he is left helpless. I wouldn't blame him for that.

 

Pish! It's a naturally curving shot, not as if it was going one way then swerved the other way, bread and butter stuff.

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Few folk critical of Johnson.

 

I'm a big fan of his but I think McGhee is doing Marvin nor the team any favours by playing him 90 minutes every week. Particularly when we set up for him to be our primary creative force. Ideally Marvin would be getting onto through balls from a creative midfielder (that we failed to sign). Instead he is expected to pick up the ball and create, which is not his game.

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I heard a few folk say exactly this at the game Busta and seen a few comments on here about it. Watching the highlights last night though casts it in a different light. Spoony whacks the ball directly at Ripley who has it covered.Then the ball takes a swerve to Ripley's right and he is left helpless. I wouldn't blame him for that.

Really? I thought it was as poor as anything Hollis/Neilsen served up.

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I heard a few folk say exactly this at the game Busta and seen a few comments on here about it. Watching the highlights last night though casts it in a different light. Spoony whacks the ball directly at Ripley who has it covered.Then the ball takes a swerve to Ripley's right and he is left helpless. I wouldn't blame him for that.

Did Laing not duck out of it as well.

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At the game I thought Cadden and Ripley were at fault. Interesting last night that McCall and Stewart were blaming Laing rather than Cadden and that makes sense that he should have moved in on Wotherspoon and let Cadden charge the ball but I think it was a double jeopardy as Ripley was left unsighted by Laing which is why he was wrong footed.

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So there should be no goals ever then...

In theory yes, every goal scored is, to a greater or lesser extent, a defensive error. It is the management team's responsibility to analyse every goal lost and devise ways to avoid losing similar goals in the future. That will never happen in reality of course. There is nothing more demoralising for players or fans to hear a manager after a game saying something along the lines of there was nothing we could have done to prevent that goal/I don't know how to prevent that from happening again.

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I'm a big fan of his but I think McGhee is doing Marvin nor the team any favours by playing him 90 minutes every week. Particularly when we set up for him to be our primary creative force. Ideally Marvin would be getting onto through balls from a creative midfielder (that we failed to sign). Instead he is expected to pick up the ball and create, which is not his game.

Absolutely. He is not playing particularly well but he is being given very poor service. His game is running onto balls and running at defenders. In that respect he is a one trick pony. Once again on Saturday he was being given passes 6 feet behind him or when he was being covered by 2/3 defenders. I lost count of the number of times he shouted for an early pass only to be ignored. It was frustrating to watch a defender or central midfielder dithering about rather than releasing him with an early ball when the opposing defenders were in disarray. In other words rank poor service. This goes on week after week.

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In theory yes, every goal scored is, to a greater or lesser extent, a defensive error. It is the management team's responsibility to analyse every goal lost and devise ways to avoid losing similar goals in the future. That will never happen in reality of course. There is nothing more demoralising for players or fans to hear a manager after a game saying something along the lines of there was nothing we could have done to prevent that goal/I don't know how to prevent that from happening again.

The players knew what to do. They did it during the game before the goal and closed both the St Johnstone players down fine.

 

All that happened was somebody switched off which led to another making a rash decision. You can coach folk all you want but shit like that happens and when we have young players such as Laing, Cadden it will happen. We just need to learn from it and not do it again.

 

As for the last minute goals...they have been for a few different reasons. But one trend is players making bad decisions when they should be fully concentrating, not standing off and keeping the tight. That can be improved by concentration and drilling it in to the players.

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The players knew what to do. They did it during the game before the goal and closed both the St Johnstone players down fine.

 

Previous to the first half goal that we lost, on 3 separate occasions, St Johnstone players were allowed free access to the right hand side of our penalty box. So, something somewhere was going wrong. Either the gameplan was deficient or a player(s) was not doing what they were supposed to be doing. Surely after the second time the alarm bells should have been ringing with Mark McGhee.

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I heard a few folk say exactly this at the game Busta and seen a few comments on here about it. Watching the highlights last night though casts it in a different light. Spoony whacks the ball directly at Ripley who has it covered.Then the ball takes a swerve to Ripley's right and he is left helpless. I wouldn't blame him for that.

 

 

 

Pish! It's a naturally curving shot, not as if it was going one way then swerved the other way, bread and butter stuff.

 

 

Really? I thought it was as poor as anything Hollis/Neilsen served up.

 

 

what these guys said.

ETA. I never watched the highlights or saw the chat about Laing. so If he moved out the way.....

 

 

In regards to Johnson, I don't think he knows what to do when he doesn't have the ball.

Edited by Busta Nut
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In regards to Johnson, I don't think he knows what to do when he doesn't have the ball.

That could equally apply to most of the team Busta. I'd say that Ripley, Moult and MacDonald would be clear exceptions but virtually the entire defence and midfield are very poor when we don't have the ball. This is probably our main weakness as a team.

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Possibly, but if Johnson is our main creative force he needs to be trying to find space and making moves looking for the ball. I just don't see him doing that at all.

I think that's a more than fair point, though without wanting to make it sound like a dig at the player (more a general observation), I'd suggest that Johnson isn't actually *that* "creative" a player. He can certainly be an effective attacking player in the right circumstances ie: if the game is stretched and he's got 20 yards behind a full back to run into but in terms being a creative player in a more traditional sense, more often than not he doesn't actually offer that much. He's certainly not going to be the guy to pick out a pass or split a defence. I don't know off the top of my head but I'd be interested to know how many assists he has this season. Maybe that goes some way to accounting for the desire to get McFadden more involved in the starting XI I don't know though again that throws up its own set of problems.

 

By extension, some of the more statto-minded folk on here might be able to answer but as daft as this may sound I'd be curious to know how many of the goals we've scored this season have actually been 'created' by say a through ball or incisive pass through the centre of the park; McDonald's through ball to Pearson for the 2nd against St Johnstone, or Pearson's pass to McDonald vs Dundee at Fir Park in December by way of an example vs how many have come from a cross or set pieces. I'm pretty sure that McDonald's 2nd against United last week was the first goal we've scored this season from outside the box.

 

Don't get me wrong, a goal's a goal, they all count and if we go on to win the rest of our fixtures with goals from crosses then I'm more than fine with that, it's not a negative as such but I do think it's interesting that at the moment Johnson seems to have a mantle of being our main attacking threat yet on the face of it he doesn't actually seem to be creating that much and in a sense we do seem to be pretty one dimensional in terms of our approach to attacking.

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I'm guessing Ben Hall judging by the way he's pointing to where the free kick, that Hall gave away, was taken. Probably due to the fact it was utterly needless given that Usain Bolt couldn't have caught John Sutton's first touch let alone big handsome himself.

 

On a related note, that's some absolutely embarrassing defending from Stevie Hammell for their 2nd goal. Bizarre that McGhee singled out young guys like Ripley, Hall & Cadden for having made mistakes that led to the 2 goals but somehow neglected to mention the experienced Hammell's pathetic attempt at defending for the winning goal.

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