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Scottish Premiership Rangers V Motherwell Sat 20 Aug 15:00


Yabba's Turd
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Was that the ref that was highlighted by Michael Stewart on Sportscene recently?

 

Very probably. He gave St Johnstone three penalties in a half against Falkirk for shirt pulling and then gave Dundee one at Dingwall for the same.

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Very probably. He gave St Johnstone three penalties in a half against Falkirk for shirt pulling and then gave Dundee one at Dingwall for the same.

The sad thing is that he is in the right. However, pretty much all of the ref's let it go cause there is so much going on in the box from both teams. Rather than call the first thing they see they just ignore the whole stramash. No clue how the referes are advised to handle those situations but it's certainly a problem when one of them is dealing with it in a different manner compared to all the others, regrdless of whether he is right or not.

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Another doing on the cards today I think.

 

McGhee's comments about the GPS tracking being 1.5km per player down is the equivalent of playing with a man less for the full game and isn't something that can be sorted by an afternoon of interval training. We completely fell out the the Rangers and St Johnstone games after an hour and honestly didn't look much fitter than an outfit like East Stirling until late on. The buck stops with McGhee for the poor pre season and bad player recruitment.

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Going the be interesting looking at formations and tactics today.

Hopefully we improve our possession stats and keep their full backs pinned back. No more sitting deep, standing off players and basically giving away terroritry.

 

Listening to MM he implies after the run around at Celtic Park, the players fitness-stamina stats dropped for the St J match.

Let's hope things have been addressed on the training ground and he impresses on a more competitive pressing game.

 

However, I'm starting to think too many current players are unfortunately short of quality and pace to compete at top SPL levels. Early days for some of them, but let's see how things develop.

Fingers crossed for a good result today and take care if you're travelling to the match.

COYW

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Listening to MM he implies after the run around at Celtic Park, the players fitness-stamina stats dropped for the St J match.

Let's hope things have been addressed on the training ground and he impresses on a more competitive pressing game.

 

However, I'm starting to think too many current players are unfortunately short of quality and pace to compete at top SPL levels. Early days for some of them, but let's see how things develop.

 

I'm not confident that these issues can be addressed in the short term Al. We are badly short of pace in some areas of the team ie full back and central midfield, and it would also appear stamina. However guys like McManus, Lasley and Hammell (I know he didn't play) just don't have the legs now. What we are short of are sound, solid workers. Take St Johnstone - no superstars but full of hard working organised journeymen who make few mistakes and hassle the opposition for 90+ minutes.

 

We'll certainly need to up our work rate if we are to take anything from today's game.

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I don't particularly think it's a lack of fitness in the squad. Our movement off the ball last week was utter garbage and we lacked any idea other than get it to Marvin or pump it up high to McDonald. They looked clueless as to how to play the ball if we couldn't get it to the wings. End result was a lot of stationary players lacking the confidence/skill most of the time to make an angle or play a forward pass. Indeed, when Clay played a few decent balls on the deck through the middle it worked pretty well. But it happened little and we had a severe lack of players wanting the ball to play it that way. Shut down Marvin and Lionel and we basically didn't know what to do.

 

I fear we will be playing the same system again today...due to the personnel we have at our disposal.

 

On a positive note...rangers are not that great defensively. So if we can get out the blocks fast and hard confidence should grow. But we need to take our chances

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I don't particularly think it's a lack of fitness in the squad. Our movement off the ball last week was utter garbage....

 

Its probably down to a number of factors. As you say we weren't giving players on the ball any options - maybe tiredness, maybe lack of confidence. Defensively our off the ball play was woeful - not hassling opponents and not closing them down.

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We need to sign someone who can cover ground in midfield and another striker who offers more than McDonald leading the line. Sadly we have wasted chunks of our budget on Blyth and Clay so it's unlikely to happen.

 

 

Lasley, McDonald and Hammell should be 1 to 1 with whoever is in charge of sport science every single day and told if they don't get into better shape they can forget about playing.

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We need to sign someone who can cover ground in midfield and another striker who offers more than McDonald leading the line. Sadly we have wasted chunks of our budget on Blyth and Clay so it's unlikely to happen.

 

 

Lasley, McDonald and Hammell should be 1 to 1 with whoever is in charge of sport science every single day and told if they don't get into better shape they can forget about playing.

Need to give Blyth more time. But Clay I do agree. Said at the time we didn't need that type of player, as we had 2.

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I don't think Blyth has shown anything other than the willingness to be an ineffective battering ram.

 

His sub appearance last week was at the level of Casagolda.

To be fair, didn't you say something similar about Moult this time last year?

 

Not that I've been particularly impressed by anything Blyth's done so far mind but you've to give the guy more of a chance to impress than two sub appearances a month apart. Especially when he's missed large parts of pre-season.

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I said that we needed McDonald because we couldn't count on Moult, Fletcher, Moore or Clarkson to score goals. Moult thankfully came good and he's got great positional play and competes well physically for his size.

 

Blyth hasn't shown anything yet other than that's he's a big unit. I don't think we can expect too much from him.

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Same team as last Saturday then. Samson keeps his place after selling the jerseys?!?!

 

Any word on Hammell or McHugh?

 

If Hammell is to miss even 1 more game after today then we need to find a replacement asap as Chalmers is worse than a man down.

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