GLF69: Gavin chats to Mark McGhee about the Uefa campaign
A Chat With The Boss
Managers normally tell you the league is their "bread and butter" and should not be undermined but Mark McGhee has never hidden his desire to sample a more exotic dish.That's why the Motherwell manager has made the UEFA Cup his priority this season.
McGhee has made no secret of the fact that the challenge of Europe, his first in 18 years of management, is the main reason he turned down Hearts to stay at FirPark.So he is keen to make the most of it and admits he would field a player in Europe at the risk of losing him for the subsequent SPL match.
When I asked him if the goal for this season was to repeat the third-place finish, he said: "I don't think we can think like that.We have got to this season prioritise. Of course we want to do well in the league as well as Europe, but we (really) want to do well in Europe. That's why I stayed at the club.We want to see if we can make that group section of the UEFA Cup and, if we do, we might have to sacrifice a bit of form in the league. We are prepared to do that for that prize.If, at that stage, I was given the choice of maybe a player that was touch and go for a game, if it was a case that he was going to play in Europe and then wouldn't play against Celtic on the Saturday, then he would play in Europe.I would give that the priority, that's how important I think it is.If we don't make the group section then we can obviously readdress our ambitions in the league."
And let's face it, why would the UEFA Cup not be the priority?It's been 13 years since the last, brief, foray and most of Motherwell's memories of playing in Europe are frustrating ones.The injuries that undermined the Katowice game - half our strikers were out and we lost the deciding away goal moments after Chris McCart suffered a head wound.The missed chances in Dortmund.Dougie Arnott's red card that gave us a mountain to climb in the return leg.The ridiculously poor preparations for the Mypa 47 game when we played just one friendly - a lacklustre, narrow win at Darlington - before the first leg against a team halfway through their season.Even after that defeat, Well were a width of a post away from turning the tie around in Finland.These are games and incidents within them that you still think back to and wonder, and it's no doubt magnified for managers and players given that European football is pretty rare for most of them.
Last season the football Motherwell played was at times superb and I'm sure it will mostly still be great to watch even if the team don't do as well this time.I can't really see Motherwell dropping out the top six but even if they do, I'm sure most fans would swap a good European run for that.
While the last couple of months of last season were as exciting as they have been for years, for me they were underpinned by a fear that the team would come so close to making Europe and just miss out.We would have been left wondering when our next opportunity would be - while probably watching McGhee take over at Tynecastle.
It always baffles me when you see English teams like Middlesbrough and Bolton playing before half-empty stadiums in the UEFA Cup then filling their ground for the visit of Wigan days later.Yet the biggest chunk of teams in the Premiership gear their whole season towards finishing fifth, sixth or seventh in the league so that they can get into the UEFA Cup.And will this prioritising have much of an effect on the players when they play in the SPL?They will still go out looking to win every game at FirPark and pick up points away from home.
Yet the talk from their manager of Europe being the main aim can only help drill into them how important it is to seize their opportunity rather than let it pass by.And, while a few players might be rested now and again, while the effects of travelling might hamper the team for the Sunday SPL game, will the European adventure have that big an effect on the SPL season?Aberdeen managed to finish fourth despite playing eight games in the UEFA Cup last season - and despite the fact they had loads of injuries, an inconsistent line-up, struggled to cope with the loss of Russell Anderson.They also reached two cup semi-finals so they had even more games to deal with and still finished above an acclaimed Dundee United side.
The issue of resting players might be more problematic if the squad is still as low as it was throughout the summer - print deadlines mean McGhee might have added a few players by now.McGhee was speaking before the first SPL game at Tynecastle, while trying to push through deals for Jim O'Brien and Blackburn keeper Gunnar Nielsen.The squad at that stage included only 13 fit players who had started more than one senior football match.But the manager did not believe Europe would have any impact on the first round of SPL fixtures.
"We are not worried about this stage in the league," he said. "It's when you get to November and December and you are playing these games in Europe and you are having to come home and play league opposition, that's when the pressure will be on.But in the first games of the season there is not the pressure on the squad that there will be later, because everyone is fit and everyone is ready to go and they have not had a lot of games and they are not tired and they have not been travelling.There is no excuse at the moment, we are looking to hit the ground running and get some points in the bag and when we get to the European stage, really be up to speed."
by Gavin McCafferty
Visit the GLF archive. Hundreds of articles.