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dunning1874

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Everything posted by dunning1874

  1. I don't have an issue with Imrie calling out McGrattan, because hamstrung as he might be by having the wretched excuse for a footballer that is Tyler French behind him, McGrattan has had chances to step into the starting XI and has played very, very badly. That was probably his last start in a Morton shirt today and if he doesn't get another chance before being released in the summer then tough shit, you had your chance to step up and didn't take it. What I do have an issue with is throwing barely concealed digs at someone like McGrattan when a player who casts himself as a linchpin of the team escapes criticism from Imrie entirely. I'm absolutely not saying it would be appropriate for a manager to start bodying players in public, but he's obviously doing it of his own accord already. If you're going to have a dig at anyone, call out the player who has spent the last two months delivering performances Adam Coakley would have been embarrassed with. Today is genuinely the angriest I've been at a Morton performance in Imrie’s time in charge, and Robbie Muirhead is the reason. Footballers miss penalties, that is entirely reasonable and forgivable, but what's not forgivable was seeing him only then start to try for the first time in 2024. In that 10 minutes after taking the most telegraphed penalty of all time he was absolutely bursting his arse: showing for passes, pressing centre backs, competing for every high ball. Things he has steadfastly refused to lower himself to for the last six weeks, because he thinks he's above it, and it was only today when the dropped points were undeniably his fault that he finally decided it was worth his while to leave first gear and try to make a difference, but it was too little, too late. I'm genuinely fucking aghast at how brazen he's been about it and I can't see how anyone could justify offering him a contract at this point: if this is your approach to Championship football then enjoy your mid-table League Two finish with East Kilbride next season.
  2. We'd have been better with Easdale in the team than Muirhead the last two months. He shouldn't be getting a contract in the summer. The season is now about getting enough points to make 8th. We'll be more likely to get there if we don't see French or Broadfoot again.
  3. As the McGrattan fanboy in chief, him getting a start ahead of Garrity is wild on recent form. Hopefully the return of Gorgeous George hauls the rest of the team back up to his level.
  4. First and foremost, the transparency here is excellent. You'll not get anything like that from another Championship club. The headline figure that we're heading for around a £200K profit this season even if we finish 8th is great news. Obviously we're not going to get Celtic or Rangers away every season, but it seems like we're moving into a more stable position with every year and the profit from this season can be used to increase the first team budget for next season, even with some of it being held back to keep us on an even keel in the event cup runs and/or a higher league position than budgeted don't materialise.
  5. That pre-Oakley unbeaten run last season we were very reliant on natural width with Quitongo on the right and McGrattan or Kabia on the left, with the long balls primarily aimed at finding the feet of wingers rather than going for Muirhead's head and trying to play off flick ons. I can understand why Imrie has stuck with things like Blues on the right when he was in fantastic form there until a few games ago, but in Oakley's absence we need that natural width back to give us an outball. Having naturally central players there is fine when we're scrapping for second balls in a congested middle of the park and you want whoever's playing out wide to be comfortable stepping inside, but with no target man to aim at we need players who are comfortable opening up space by hugging the touchline, linking up with Strapp and French and carrying us up the park by running at full backs. Garrity has to start next week.
  6. Strapp was the only one of the starting XI getting pass marks and he's off as well. Fucking nonsense.
  7. Make subs when the game's already gone and leaves French on. This is mad.
  8. I've seen managers get the brainwave to move full backs into holding midfield before and it usually goes terribly, but at least you can often see the thought process in those full backs being good passers of the ball so might be able to spray it around from midfield. I think French genuinely has the worst distribution of any professional footballer I've ever seen including goalkeepers, and he's predictably been even more abysmal than usual. The goal though is entirely on Power. Absolutely brainless to try to bring it down and take a touch with the ball dropping in that area of the park with Graham a yard away from it him, he was always more likely to lose it than keep it and there's nothing anyone else can do about it once Graham's away from Power. It had been coming though, we've looked lost since kick-off. The feeling without Oakley has been that we're beaten as soon as we're behind, and we've had even less attacking threat here than we've had in any of the last four games with Gillespie also having no idea what he's doing in an advanced role and no width. With Broadfoot on a booking get him off for Garrity and reshuffle everyone else into their real positions.
  9. This is a 4-2-3-1 with O'Connor right back, Power and French sitting, Gillespie in the middle of the 3. This seems insane.
  10. No wins or clean sheets in 8 for Partick, no goals in 5 of our last 6. I'd be fine to see us persist with the back three here, Broadfoot man marking Graham isn't the worst idea and the performance against Hearts was certainly the best we've had in this run without Oakley. If you wanted to make it more attacking to account for not needing to be as defensive at Firhill as against Hearts you could have Crawford deeper and put Garrity or McGrattan in for Gillespie to play off Muirhead, but I'd leave it as is as that probably brings too much of a risk of giving up the midfield. If Crawford plays his usual pressing game while their wingers manage to pin Strapp & French back, that could easily turn into a 5-2-3 rather than 3-5-1-1 and you've isolated Power and Blues.
  11. It does say this in the GMFC Articles, but agreed that it's not the best look for the club to be mixing the two up in an official update. As for Harkins being co-opted as an MCT representative, I don't particularly have an issue with this. While all of the Directors who are there in a capacity as MCT representatives should really have gone through the process of being elected to that board by the membership in the first place, the fact is that the MCT majority representation does need to be maintained and we're still under three years into fan ownership, so we've not really had a great amount of time to have that pipeline of MCT board to GMFC board setup. In fact I think I'm right in saying that none of the 7 current MCT board members have been on the board for two years, and it's possible none of them want to make that move. I don't really see this turnover of directors as a problem rather than the inevitable consequence of having big changes so recently, with that initial group of MCT directors moving to the GMFC board as the takeover was completed follower by needing a fresh group of MCT directors, then we've also had further changes to the articles of both GMFC & MCT in the years since the takeover to define how the two boards should interact. It's inevitable that it would take some time to stabilise in the initial years of what is still a relatively recent ownership change, but hopefully if something like this comes up again in another couple of years we won't have the same need to look outside the existing MCT directors.
  12. There are plenty of questions about the XI if Oakley isn't fit, and we've explicitly been told by the manager there's no chance. He is not making it. In his absence over the last three games Imrie has switched between Quitongo and Muirhead up front, so there's the obvious first debate. We've gone with natural width with Garrity & McGrattan starting once and persisted with Muirhead and Blues out wide in the other two - which had Millen screaming "too narrow" at the pair of them for most of the first half v Dundee United - while there's also a debate about whether we'd rather have Blues or Gillespie beside Power. Broadfoot is also fit again with O'Connor having had two dreadful performances in a row so it's possible you could see a change there, while we even switched to a back three with Broadfoot coming on against Inverness. The team is a long way away from picking itself, there are five or six variations of personnel or formation that wouldn't be a surprise.
  13. A bad day and defeat was inevitably going to come after such a long run, but unfortunate that it was today considering the upcoming fixtures. The concern is if that's going to be typical of performances without Oakley and Wilson: without them we have no physical presence to speak of outwith the centre backs and every team in the division could bully us the way Inverness did today. Inverness well worth the win, managed having an early lead superbly and outwith the disallowed goal we created absolutely f**k all, because they didn't let us.
  14. Bearne the only attacking sub, it's not taken much for us to be back to bare bones. Arguable that Wilson, Oakley and Mullen are the three worst players to lose but that's still a good starting XI.
  15. Imrie's 100th game in charge. What a manager he's been for us. Mullen, Wilson and Oakley all missing is a huge blow. Assuming Muirhead and Quitongo are in better shape than they were they on Tuesday but still not 100% I'd only start one of them here, preferably Muirhead at centre forward. We can have fresher legs out wide with Garrity and McGrattan with Blues moving inside rather than starting Gillespie and Power together, as you'll surely not get 90 minutes out of Power if we're starting him again v Dundee United. Quitongo is then a great impact sub. We don't want to risk more injuries when it was clear neither Muirhead or Quitongo were fully fit on Tuesday and we've got another Tuesday night game on the way.
  16. With no Oakley or Mullen, losing Wilson early while Muirhead was clearly miles off being fit and Quitongo isn't 100% either, that's a very good point. Had the chances to win it but don't think either team could claim to be hard done by with a draw.
  17. The run is inevitably going to end eventually, but it would be brilliant to keep it going tonight. Imrie is evidently fired up for it. Managing the squad with the midweek games is a challenge but we've got the depth to rotate now, provided one of Oakley and Muirhead make it.
  18. A massive win. The tone for Airdrie’s performance was set by Taylor-Sinclair's hideous challenge on Crawford inside the first 5 minutes. The elbow only came up after the ball was already gone, it was an obviously deliberate attempt to elbow an opponent in the head in midair, it was as dangerous a challenge as you'll see on a football pitch and it was utterly negligent refereeing to only book him. They knew then they would get away with murder and carried on attempting it for the rest of the game. You could see how fired up we were to overcome their thuggery and it was a tremendous delivery from Quitongo for the first. With the laughter at how far offside Garrity looked to be for the second at the time (turns out he wasn't) there wasn't enough focus on how good a finish it was, an exceptional strike. When you've raced into a two goal lead that early you want the sting taken out the game rather than continuing to go at a million miles an hour and leaving huge gaps yourselves that can let the opposition back into the game, we did that well but as the half wore on I thought we got a bit too flat and were allowing them a bit too much room in midfield, for all that we still didn't look in much danger from open play. Second half we looked right back in control early on and should have had it buried between Quitongo's header off the bar and the one cleared off the line from a corner, but we went noticeably downhill after the subs. That's not to say the subs were the wrong decision, with the way the referee had lost control of the game getting players on bookings off was definitely the right thing to do, but both Waters and Broadfoot had a pretty terrible time of it and they started getting some joy down that side. Where they really took control of the game was in us losing Oakley as an outball, once again Taylor-Sinclair should have been off for the way he deliberately went after him and elbowed him off the park. He knew he was getting away with it and kept at it until he inevitably injured him. Garrity did what he could moved through the middle but he was breathing out his arse himself by that point with the running he'd done and it left them knowing they could pin us back. A poor goal to lose, not sure who it was that lost their man, but we saw it out without another clear cut chance coming their way despite the additional 90 minutes of injury time. Would have been robbery if we'd dropped points there. Cammy Blues by the way, what a performance. A lot of people praising Power and rightly so, he was excellent in possession, but the ground Blues covered defensively was ridiculous. Feels like every week lately you come away thinking that might have been his best game in a Morton shirt, he's in fantastic form and it's a real testament to his performance that the midfield still looked so good despite missing Wilson.
  19. Wilson missing is a huge blow but hopefully the legs out wide make up for it.
  20. If there's one good thing about it it's recovery time for our players with playing Tuesday-Monday rather than Tuesday-Friday, removes any concern about Hearts being fresher, but in every other respect that is pish.
  21. Livingston at home is clearly the best tie available. Would much rather have Hibs or Aberdeen than Kilmarnock.
  22. Even if you're not wholly separating Sinclair St and the Cowshed or bringing the space behind the pundits back into use (and you can understand the risks of doing so), you could still comfortably have fit at least another 1000 people into the Cowshed last night, maybe even closer to 2000. Even with the space not being in use for the gantry, adding another 1500 would only have made it about as busy as the 2015 game v Peterhead which was a long way away from being dangerously overcrowded. 2500 is a ridiculously conservative estimate even we have a TV gantry and every single person with a terracing ticket does go into the Cowshed and ignore the Sinclair Street end. 3500 would be a far more realistic, but still probably too low, number of Cowshed tickets. If you find a way to segregate Sinclair St and the Cowshed then you can get another 1000-1500 in Sinclair St. I think in the past whenever we had Sinclair St separated (think we did this for the Celtic game in 2010 with 10,136 the reported attendance?) access to the main stand has been allowed for use of women's toilets there, but maybe the evolution in safety rules isn't going to allow that now?
  23. What a sensational performance that was. 2-1 flattered Motherwell there. Lots of focus on the performances of the centre backs and Oakley, rightly so as they were all superb, but once again the man of the match for me was Iain Wilson. He is stupidly good and dominated that midfield. This is undoubtedly the best Morton team in my time watching the club. I do not expect to ever see a manager as good as Imrie at this club again.
  24. "we have less than 400 tickets remaining for the home ends, which is why the decision was taken to close the ticket office this evening. The timing of this has been very fast paced in the last 24 hours due to the fact that we had only sold 800 home tickets by Wednesday this week and as of last night we were sat at 2,400 when I was on a call with our safety team at midnight." Well, obviously ticket sales shot up suddenly from yesterday. Without fans being told that the capacity of the ground had been reduced by over 4000, no one knew earlier in the week that they had an urgent need to buy a ticket or risk not getting to the game! There was no reason to believe there'd be an issue with buying the day before, on the day or even 30 minutes before kick-off. This is a Rae era level of complete disregard for fans. The absence of a grovelling apology in that statement for how they've handled this is noted.
  25. Heard that Smiths are now out of tickets too, so with the ticket office closed at the ground, just under 6 hours to kick-off and comfortably less than half the capacity of the home end sold, there is now no way to get a ticket if you don't have a smartphone. This is a considerably bigger shambles than the turnstiles.
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