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The theme of conversation with 'Well fans over the last couple of months appears to be "Crisis ? What Crisis ?" as we stutter from one good result or performance to some (more) absolutely shocking results and performances. How can we one week destroy Aberdeen or Kilmarnock (at home) and follow this up by being as appalling as we were against Falkirk, Thistle and Raith (twice) ?
One of the main contributory reasons is obviously the number of injuries we are carrying. Not many clubs our size could cope with 7 or 8 of the first team pool being out at the same time. I believe this is where the inexperience of our manager has been shown through and one of his publicly acknowldged mistakes has been made - by replacing injured players by others playing out of position. At Easter Road we started with Andy Roddie at left back and got punished by his lunging attackers tackle to give them the penalty for the secong goal. What is galling here is that we had a left back on the bench in young Steven McMillan, why not pick him from the start ? We have also seen McSkimming at left back and Softie ar right back - both looked a bit uncomfortable.
On the upside we have seen the emergence of some of the youngsters, in patricular the performances of Steven McMillan and Greig Denham, who have made the step up with no problem. Let's hope we can find a young front man to join them, maybe big Roy will be the one. Although it cannot help them that they are on the bench one week and not even in the 14 the next.
The other mistake I think the club has made is not investing sufficiently in the squad when we were doing well. Albeit we bought Van De Gaag (who??), McSkimming and Hendry - but none of them can be judged yet due to their respective injury problems. But in the meantime we have seen clubs like Dundee Utd and Falkirk sign people like McSwegan, Coyle and Derek Ferguson who could all have done a job for us. The squad needs freshened up, the current squad has been together for almost 3 years and are perhaps getting too comfortable with each other. Successful clubs are always adding players to their squad in constant quest for continuous improvement. The options are now limited as many of the players we have considered at one time have all been bought up. Although I would suggest Brewster and Wieghorst would be useful additions. To help fund any moves it may be we have to lose one of our top assets - the likely candidate being McKinnon, let's hope we get a realistic fee if he is to go - 1.5 million pounds seems about right.
The proposed swap of Dolan for Hamilton (the Hearts midfielder not the Accies) I believe would not leave us any better off, if it was to be any Hearts player I would rather it was John Miller, who can score goals from midfield. But we need new faces quickly before we end up deep(er) in the relegation mire, and launch a late bid for a European place !!!
The other topic of conversation seems once again to be "McLeish must go!", a typical knee jerk reaction of the football fan, and I am sorry to say the Motherwell support in particular. Some people obviously have short memories of the turmoil of the seventies and eighties when the door to the Managers office was replaced with a revolving one. It subsequently took Tommy McLean and the current board 10 years to recover the situation. At a time like this it is important that we get behind the Manager, we are only one third into the season and surely it is at the end of the season that we should judge.
In conclusion times may be a bit depressing at the moment, but lets all get behind the team and give them all the encouragment we can. How would you like at your work to have someone telling you you're crap every time you try to do anything!!
Finally this is the second issue of the fanzine to cost 80p, the increase was due to an increase of costs at the printers. This issue has increased by 4 pages which I hope will see us continue to give value for money. Bearing in mind we are still 20p cheaper than our advert laden programme with 4 more pages !!! As usual at this point I would like to send out a plea for more contributions from our readers, we have now established a hard core 7 or 8 contributers BUT I would like to see a wider range of opinions expressed - so come on take 10-15 minutes to write down your thoughts and keep our fanzine in the Top 10.
Graham Barnstaple