dunning1874

Delighted to end up with a good manager at the end of it all, but the whole process throws up further serious questions about the competence of a club board who are supposed to be delivering improved governance. With Miller remaining in charge yesterday and Murray presumably taking over from training tomorrow, that was 40 days of an interim management team, where we seemingly chopped and changed between which one of Miller & Davies was picking the team. The results throughout that spell have been abject. In the league, P5 W1 D1 L3 F5 A11. We also had two draws with lower league opposition in cups, with one win and one loss on penalties. It's been an appalling run of form. While I'm very glad we've ended up with Murray at the end of it, particularly when literally every other candidate linked by any credible journalist would have been a comedy choice, you do have to ask if results would have continued to be so bad if we'd made the appointment in a reasonable timeframe. Taking five weeks and seven games is a ridiculous amount of time. The whole process has appeared to be a shambles. Just deciding not to bother even looking at a recruitment process for the first three weeks, presumably because they were hoping they could sit back and do nothing, the interim management team would have good results and they could twist Davies' arm into taking it permanently off the back of that. When results were instead utter shite only then, three weeks in, did they decide it would be worth their time to draw up a shortlist, which they announced in a deliberately ambiguous statement that meant no one had a clue which one of Davies or Miller was now the caretaker. Then it still dragged out for another three games, with the winless run growing ever longer and any hope of getting clear of the relegation battle vanishing. While poor governance of off-field issues should rightly take a central focus as that's an existential threat to the club, the incompetence on football matters is sabotaging us on the park as well.

Yeah, he saw basically as soon as it went to 2-1 that O'Halloran's lack of energy couldn't be sustained so put Moffat on for him to give us someone who covered more ground defensively. That was an entirely logical decision, then he undermined it minutes later by putting Shaw on for Brophy, leaving us in the exact same position of carrying a winger who is utterly useless defensively. That was decisive with Shaw's absolute abdication of responsibility for the winner, we'd genuinely have been better off with nobody there than him drawing arrows for Watt for where to go and the angle to shoot from. The first task for Murray is to melt that waster down for glue/send him to Kirkcaldy, whichever's cheaper.

On the balance of play you'd say Partick were largely controlling possession and have spent much more time in our half than we have in theirs, but ultimately they've created nothing while we could be 4-0 up. The first 5-10 minutes after going 1-0 up especially I thought we were a bit too deep, but it's proven to be the right approach since. The counter attack is absolutely shredding them. If they continue to have this much of the ball they are going to score and you know it will be instant panic if it comes back to 2-1, we'll probably be 3-2 down within 10 minutes of the first, but we could have the game out of sight if we're a bit more ruthless.

https://gmfc.net/ian-murray-arrives-as-new-first-team-manager/

Even if in the extremely unlikely event he wanted to, Crawford Rae's running of the club was shambolic, like Douglas before him. That John Laird contrived to be worse doesn't mean we should be welcoming Crawford back with open arms. A huge part of the appeal of the takeover in the first place was the opportunity to move on from decades of incompetent governance of the club. Morton had been a laughing stock for years and it was the mismanagement of the Raes that caused that reputation. While there were always things to criticise, things had started improving off the park after MCT took over and before Laird arrived; getting better on the park while consistently breaking even off it was a massive achievement. That we've now slid right back to the "typical Morton" of 10 years ago who are roundly seen as a joke across Scottish football with the club once again appearing to have the same contempt for the fanbase that defined the Rae era is massively disappointing and hopefully Laird's departure is an opportunity for a reset, but Crawford Rae is the last person I'd consider a good candidate to fix that.

The seven figures has to be a mistake by the Record. Six would still be wild but £100K would be a believable case of a League One club pushing their luck, Kelty Hearts are not asking for £1M for Michael Tidser. Amazed to realise that Murray is still only 44. He was managing Dumbarton against us 13 years ago!

I didn't particularly want any of the unemployed recently managed in the Championship options when we were initially managerless because I saw them all as a downgrade on Imrie, but Murray is by a considerable distance the most appealing and I can't keep pining after Imrie forever. I'd much rather have him than McCabe or Doolan and we'd hit the point where even total duds like Rankin and McPake have been rumoured to have turned it down, so to end up with a manager with Murray's pedigree when you were starting to panic that Michael Tidser might actually be the least bad option left would be good. The job he did with Dumbarton in challenging for the promotion playoffs means there's actually a track record of achievement on a small budget that is relevant experience for the Morton job, when many of the other names mentioned have never worked in those circumstances. The 22/23 season with Raith also gets mentioned and I do feel that maybe gets overrated a bit, in no small part due to making that direct comparison to Imrie having us 14 points above Raith with a more difficult job, but again it's a situation where he's had less money to work with than many competitors and done a perfectly acceptable job.

I'd have preferred a sterner line to be taken on the fact that no evidence whatsoever has been presented of any abuse, but it's a tough balancing act when the MCT board need to maintain a relationship with the rest of the GMFC board. Especially when it now has national media attention they can't be seen to be downplaying the importance of abuse, which is how it could easily be spun if they challenged more strongly. Even though the Morton support and MCT membership at large can fairly guess the most likely explanation of the abuse line is that it's been fabricated or heavily exaggerated to deflect from the incompetent mismanagement of the club, which is the real reason Laird's position was untenable, they can't explicitly make that accusation. If it then turned out there is actually some truth in it then that would look terrible and be used to attack them in turn.

The personal abuse line really is straight out of the Hugh Scott playbook. Interesting that he's never wanted to go into specifics about his 40 year association with the club and whether he was involved at all from 1997-2001.

If John Laird wants to talk about respect and decency, he should maybe reflect on how much of that he's given others in his time at the club. We could start with the way Graham McLennan was unceremoniously removed as a honorary director in the summer?

That statement sums John Laird up really. No acknowledgement of the gross incompetence that made his position untenable several months ago, never mind an apology for the complete mismanagement of the club, utter contempt for the support oozing out of every sentence, completely fabricated lies about personal abuse he's faced which simply did not happen. Good fucking riddance.

Coming round to the idea that all these rumours are being planted by the board to make Tidser seem an appealing option. Obviously I don't want him, but if the choice was him or James McPake...

Ultimately both those things can't be true: if we'd only just offered it to and been turned down by Rankin, Arfield leaving Falkirk can't be anything to do with us because it would surely have taken a while for him to negotiate his departure from Falkirk. Going somewhere else as a player is the most likely explanation for him. Of course the Rankin rumour could also be guff.

If - that's the massive caveat on every word to follow - we're genuinely in the place where we've sunk as low as offering the job to John Rankin in the first place then that's a bigger crisis than him turning it down because he's only been offered a six month contract. Someone with his managerial record should be crawling over broken glass to get six days from any Championship club. If that's the calibre of applicant we're dealing with then it suggests something at the club is utterly toxic and putting people off, a worry which would be heightened by someone like that who shouldn't be able to dream of getting a Championship job turning it down. A low budget alone is not going to put people off wanting a full-time Championship job because dozens of managers go in for every job no matter how desperate the situation seems. Either the structure in relation to how they're expected to work with Davies is the issue - it's as unclear to prospective managers as it is to us, or it's clear to them that they're to be his assistant behind closed doors while carrying the can in public and they're not willing to do it - or the Morton board's reputation is in the mud across Scottish football as a whole rather than just with the Morton support and no manager is willing to go near working with this board.

It's another game down without getting any closer to 9th or 10th, so there's the positive. It was considerably less inept than expected considering the form we're in, but it's just such an uninspiring team. We were actually alright at reaching the final third today, but the decision making when we get there is all over the place and means we consistently waste promising positions.