dunning1874

Worth noting that the comment in the club's financial update everyone seized on to now say "we have the lowest budget and can't compete" was Graham Barr saying "it's probably one of the lowest, if not the lowest in the division." So the board aren't certain that it is actually lower than at least one other club, and the obvious candidate for that would be Stenhousemuir. Stenhousemuir won their League Cup group without losing, drawing 2-2 at Firhill and holding Livingston to a 0-0. Nothing such an esteemed manager as Marvin Bartley can do to overcome the budget I guess!

This is a wink wink response. The truth is there if we read your posts really closely, but you're not going to explicitly tell us. Perhaps everyone here is thick and simply can't understand what you're getting at, but the mostly likely explanation for why you're refusing to give a straight answer when asked is that these benevolent investors don't exist. If they did and were so desperate to invest in Morton they could always approach the club or MCT themselves.

Tell us all about it rather than indulging in this ITK wink wink nudge nudge bollocks then, because no one else has the slightest clue who or what you're talking about. If this mythical no-strings attached investor actually exists and is just waiting to be invited to spend their money on Morton without asking for anything in return then it would be extremely helpful to everyone to know about it and learn how they can pressure GMFC & MCT to facilitate it.

Murray in the same article, on fan reaction to previous results and the financial situation: "I don't have any complaints about them being disgruntled beforehand because of the results, because they didn't know the full picture. It was frustrating for me as much as it was for them because I couldn't say too much about it, but we knew what was going on and the challenges of what was going on. When you add all that together, you can see how hard the circumstances are at the moment. But they can see the players giving absolutely everything, regardless of what we have and what we don't have." See if we're going to accept the line summarised as "the budget makes it impossible" as an explanation for every defeat - certainly valid after St Johnstone with the number of players missing and the need to use teenagers, may turn out to be valid against Championship opposition if Dalrada's intransigence continues - then not only does that not stand up as an excuse for being outplayed and deservedly beaten at home to Linlithgow Rose, it actively defeats the argument to use it when we're playing Championship opposition. If it was impossible for teams to avoid defeat against sides with much larger budgets, then it would be impossible for Linlithgow Rose to beat Morton even with our constraints. We didn't lose that game because of the budget, we lost that game because of Ian Murray doing an abysmal job, just as we lost 7 of our last 11 games last season when we had a far more competitive squad because of his management. We're all aware that the club has bigger problems than who the manager is right now thanks to Dalrada, and he is completely blameless for the St Johnstone result. That doesn't mean the manager gets to shrug his shoulders and say defeats to Lowland League East opposition are nothing to do with him. That's a total abdication of responsibility and a further case of him looking out only for his own reputation after he leaves, if he believes a defeat in every single game is inevitable then there's no point in him being here.

If that's the case and he's again thinking of Wilson as a centre back above anything else, that would still give us five defenders (Ballantyne, Longridge, Moore, Fairnie & Wilson) and five central midfielders (Cochrane, Gillespie, Sandilands, Robertson & O'Toole), even if you strictly think of Savoury as someone to play further up the park and don't include him. Offering Carse or any other central midfielder any kind of contract in those circumstances is simply ridiculously stupid regardless of the budget constraints; in fact the smaller the budget is, the stupider the decision gets. Every penny available needs to go towards the defence.

Have they? Was there anything that specifically required a statement before now? That's said without knowing how long Dalrada's payments have been outstanding, but it appears this has come out now in response to the uproar after the two results this week (which could have been avoided by a competent manager regardless of the reduced budget).

The headline news from that is Dalrada being late with payments, again. By the sounds of that the club, already having a reduced budget, are having to hold back money they could otherwise have spent because they don't know when Dalrada are going to pay what they owe. That's completely unacceptable, last summer they started an extremely public bunfight that did massive harm to the club's reputation in order to insist on the presence of several board members who would otherwise have been forced out there and then, in return for large sums of money. While the continued incompetence of their chosen board members has seen them all fall by the wayside, we now find out they haven't even paid all the money they've committed to.

Okay, capital expenditure to improve facilities and generate long term revenue is far harder to fund without a private backer, yes. That's exactly what the Estrella deal is for though, trying to bring that investment in without the ridiculous strings Dalrada attached that money had to be wasted on players. Maybe it won't be enough money, maybe they'll be the wrong investors, but the club have tried to attract investment and this is the interested party we've got.

How is "spend only what we bring in and hope we punch above the weight of the budget on the park" an idealistic pipe dream which needs examples, when it's the exact thing Morton have successfully done in four years of the last five? While your alternative plan of selling up to an unidentified billionaire who definitely exists, definitely wants to spend their money on Morton with no strings attached, and won't saddle the club with debt or take land away is not a pipe dream which needs examples, but hard nosed common sense? Only one of these suggestions is completely failing to acknowledge the reality of where Morton are in 2026.

If it turns out to be true then I'll turn my criticism to the board and take back what I'm about to say about Murray, but by far the most credible explanation for his comment that we might not sign anyone else and it's up the board to give him more money is that he's telling absurd lies to save his own skin. His gross incompetence as a manager could be marginally less annoying if he wasn't simultaneously proving himself to be a Jim McInally level charlatan who'll happily burn the club down around him in order to find someone else to blame for his own failures. The day before the Linlithgow game he was in the Tele openly talking about more recruitment, without the slightest suggestion that we were done. Then we lose twice in four days leading to entirely merited criticism of Murray for overseeing such poor performances and results, and all of a sudden this is what we've got to work with, don't criticise me, ask the board about more signings. It's a deflection tactic. If we were actually done for signings and the budget was now completely gone, why would he have used his last pennies on an 18 year old central midfielder - described by Murray himself as one for the future who we'll look to loan out - when we already have another five central midfielders, but only have four defenders and one goalkeeper? If it was true that the last of the budget had actually gone on O'Toole then it would be wild on Murray's part to misuse his budget in that way, but in reality even he isn't that incompetent: it just isn't true. He is shamelessly trying to gaslight the support into blaming anyone but himself, because he's already given up on being capable of getting results with Morton. Every word is calculated to try to protect his reputation so there's the least harm possible to Ian Murray's future job prospects whenever he finally departs Morton. The possibility that his reputation could be protected by actually trying to do a good job here in the first place has already been disregarded by him, so settle in for several more weeks of him lashing out and taking absolutely no responsibility for a mess of his own making.

I absolutely don't want it to be Miller, for the record.

Realistically we're probably stuck with an internal appointment when he goes as well which won't be popular, but rolling the dice on whichever of Gary Miller or a senior player is next in line while the window is open is still an obviously less bad option than the 0 points from 36 games he has us heading for.

Which also makes it much harder to have any sympathy for Murray complaining about the budget. Yes, it's undoubtedly the smallest full-time budget in the division, but it's still obviously better than Stenhousemuir, Linlithgow and East Fife. How much money has he cost the club through his own incompetence which could instead have been in his wage budget if he hadn't lost all of these games?

It's apparent that deflecting blame for this mess in the hope of salvaging any of his reputation once he's inevitably sacked is more important to Murray to actually trying to do anything to avoid the mess in the first place. Any excuse he can give that makes it someone else's fault will be trotted out. He can't get more out of players than the sum of their parts, he can't set a team up to shitfest to grind results out, he can't recruit to address the weaknesses and he can't acknowledge any of those facts. It's simply impossible for this to get better until he goes.

Not to mention that the Easdales already were involved with Morton in the recent past, pulling their sponsorship and ceasing all involvement as soon as they didn't have a family member on the playing staff.