GLF79 - Graham gets some perspective.
A Club in Crisis
There was an SPL club in crisis in late December/early January, and surprisingly it wasn’t Rangers or Dunfermline or Hibs or Hearts, according to our support it was – Motherwell!!
This was because we had lost three League games in a row and unbelievably dropped to fifth in the SPL! To the modern generation of Motherwell fans this would appear to mount to crisis. I would just like to say (in a Supertramp album title style) - Crisis? What Crisis?
These are not the days of fighting off our financial woes when we were in administration, or the days where we were constantly fighting relegation battles. In the relegation days our major competitors have been teams like Morton, Partick Thistle, Falkirk, Hamilton, would you swap places with any of them nowadays.
Financially we are in a much better place than SPL competitors Rangers, Hearts, Kilmarnock, Dunfermline and again I wouldn’t want to swap places with any of them.
I think we need to get a sense of perspective about what type of club we are, as Stuart McCall said after the recent win over St Johnstone, “We are Motherwell, we are what we are”. What he was trying to say I think was we are a small club that is “punching above it’s weight” - there I mentioned it!!
Budget-wise we are behind the six city sides (Rangers, Celtic, Hearts, Hibs, Dundee Utd and Aberdeen) and Kilmarnock and probably on a par or above the rest of the SPL. Therefore if you went by that alone we should be sitting in the bottom six every season, and fighting relegation with the others down there.
1 The financial support of John Boyle, and there is a worry here now that he has walked away and the financial stability of the club could depend upon the success of The Well Society.
2 Good use of the talent we have. I know we've all worried about the lack of depth in our squad. I am now convinced the strategy of looking for quality over quantity is the right way forward. Better to invest in one Nicky Law than two average players.
3 Manager selection – you have to give praise to the board for their selection of manager’s since the departure of Maurice Malpas. They have decided not to go down the road of the usual Scottish suspects, and are prepared to think outside the box. Even when it did go wrong with Jim Gannon they acted swiftly to get rid of him before he dragged us down completely.
4 Dressing room spirit – from what I hear the dressing room's a very tight place with no nonsense taken by the senior pros. There is also a spirit that sees new players welcomed and absorbed into the squad seamlessly. If you follow any of them on Twitter you'll see that, with the banter going backwards and forwards between them.
There are many reasons why we are capable of punching above our weight;
Thankfully the crisis was halted in late January with seven points out of nine in a week, and the six we put past Morton taking our goal tally in three home games to twelve. As always in football you are only one game away from a crisis and by the time you read this we could be hearing talk of this once again!
Graham Barnstaple
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