dunning1874

Lopata-White is totally comfortable on the left, and like Moore and Owens he's simply a much better defender. If he hadn't already been given a contract Longridge's performance yesterday would have moved me from understanding that keeping him could be a good idea due to versatility to binning him, because while he's capable of being fine inconsistency is a horrible trait in a centre back. The games where he's hopeless outnumber those where he's competent, we're a worse team with him on the park.

Murray's addiction to not having a midfield has cost us at least 6 points in half a season, he's a disgracefully naive manager for someone who's been doing it for over a decade. There was no point in that game today that we weren't crying out for a centre back on for a winger and Wilson in midfield but he persisted, persisted and persisted with leaving a wide open midfield after every warning sign and the obvious ending was a wholly deserved defeat.

That was an absolute peach of a hit from Blues. This hasn't been very good and we've left far too much space in midfield, but it's a lovely spot from Gillespie to play Blues in and an absolute thunderbastard of a goal.

Our fourth best centre back and our best central midfielder at centre back is certainly a bold call. As is our second best goalkeeper, and playing 4-2-3-1 when you could drop one of the 3 behind the strikers for a centre back and have Wilson in midfield.

It's being able to cover left back that makes keeping him worthwhile for me, though I was undecided on it. Competent full back cover is hard to come by so having someone who can play left back and another position is fine. He absolutely shouldn't be a starter though, we've got three better natural centre backs than him and Wilson's better there as well for all that we need him in midfield.

Yeah it's about £80K, not to be sniffed at. Four points from the next two games and we should be going to Dingwall mathematically safe already, barring some ridiculous results elsewhere.

Yeah that's two good games in a row from Shaw, but even if he maintains that for all of the next five which would be a remarkable level of consistency for any winger to suddenly find, you're talking about handing someone a contract based on 7 games. If he maintains the end product you'd have to think about it, but that could easily just be a purple patch.

Even if Airdrie are already relegated come the last day and we don’t get the pleasure of being the final nail, lording it over a relegated Sean McGinty for 90 minutes would be a glorious thing. From this position we should look to have safety mathematically secured before we go to Dingwall.

It's still an excellent performance and result overall, but Murray really needs to get over his aversion to using all his subs. The midfield went to pieces as soon as he brought O'Halloran on and putting Taylor on for Main or Shaw who were both knackered from the work they'd done was the obvious fix to revert back to the shape we'd had when MacPherson was on, but he once again only made three changes and left the midfield wide open, which had us in danger of throwing away two points in a game we should have won comfortably. I'm fine with a manager deciding they have a core of players they trust and clearly O'Halloran is in that group while Taylor isn't, but at times like today it's cutting your nose off to spite your face when we've lost control of a game we were dominating. Still, once again a very good performance overall and the positives from Murray are comfortably outweighing the negatives.

This is an excellent performance, but concerning to only be one up when the game should be buried already. First 15 minutes I was a bit worried that we were playing ourselves into trouble too often trying to play out without Gillespie creating space, we were losing possession in our own half too often, but persisting led to the first goal and we've been terrific since. Two really good goals but it should have been four with Main missing two sitters, then we concede cheaply.

Players who had a go up front today: Michael Garrity Owen Moffat Nathan Shaw Iain Wilson Fergus Owens (for 2 minutes) Arron Lyall Some laugh. Other than the flurry of corners at the start of the second half Ayr weren't threatening at all, a team who look totally lost and there's only one way that can be fixed. Wilson (when he wasn't a centre forward), Delaney and Comrie were all really good but Moffat was terrific, what a difference in him since Murray took over. While 7 bookings in 8 games is wild, Gillespie's booking today was an even worse decision than his booking at Airdrie. He was genuinely playing the ball as the ref blew his whistle, it wasn't kicking the ball away by any stretch of the imagination.

We're the better team here. Still vulnerable at set-pieces and can't see a clean sheet so we need to kill this. The first 20 minutes Ayr were getting a lot of joy with a ball over the top down our right, it's testament to Murray that I couldn't even see what he changed to fix it but it completely stopped after that. Brutal to end up with even more injuries.

The idea that any internal/inexperienced appointment is automatically a bad one doesn't really stand up. To give one example of it working, Alan Burrows started out at Motherwell as part of the media team doing articles for their website and through a series of internal promotions became their CEO, where he lasted for 10 years over a highly successful period for them on and off the park before being headhunted to a bigger club. I'll judge him on what he does in the job.

There's still some degree of credit in the bank left for Garrity having been our top scorer last season and currently our second top scorer in this one, but he really has been rank the last two games. You can't put the consistent poor decision making down to playing through the middle. Didn't appreciate until I saw the winner back how bad it is from Johnson. I don't think it's just that Storer would have kept it out, he'd probably have got down and held it without even needing to parry it rather than dangling a leg towards it. That's 10 goals conceded over the 4 consecutive defeats, and at least 4 of them are obvious Johnson mistakes that have taken us from drawing to losing. Storer's return can't come quickly enough, we're not going to win games with a keeper throwing one in at critical times every week.

That's now 4 wins in 6 for them and they're 4 points ahead of us, they're the form team in the league and it'll need a collapse for them to end up in the bottom two from here. Despite having played one fewer game and being on the same points though, Ayr getting reeled into the relegation battle isn't out of the question. Only 1 win in 8 for them, we can't lose down there next week.