dunning1874

No climbdown here: I simply listed every club below us in the league. Every club below us, like every club above us, in fact has a larger first team squad than Morton. Airdrie's first team squad, not including any of their regens: Kieran Wright, Cade Melrose, Alex Bannon, Cammy Bruce, Flynn Duffy, Sam Graham, Mason Hancock, Dylan MacDonald, Lewis Strapp, Aaron Taylor-Sinclair, Craig Watson, Aidan Wilson, Rhys Armstrong, Adam Frizzell, Gavin Gallagher, Rhys McCabe, Dean McMaster, Liam McStravick, Lewis McGrattan, Lewis McGregor, Chris Mochrie, Aaron Reid, Ben Wilson, Ricco Diack. 24 players. Feel free to explain which of these obviously first team players should be eliminated from this list. Morton's first team squad: Ryan Mullen, Gary Woods, Cammy Ballantyne, Zak Delaney, Dylan Corr, Jack Baird, Morgan Boyes, Cammy Blues, Grant Gillespie, Iain Wilson, Aaron Lyall, Ali Crawford, Owen Moffat, Nathan Shaw, Michael Garrity, Niall McGinn, Jordan Davies, Lamar Reynolds, Tomi Adeloye, Filip Stuparevic (only fair to still include him as it was only injury that sent him back to Motherwell). 20 players. Even if you include Murdoch and Keay we still have a smaller first team squad. If your next move here to continue digging rather than admitting you're wrong is going to be arguing that anyone who's under 21 but was nevertheless obviously signed to be part of their first team doesn't actually count because of their age, good luck explaining why Dylan Corr and Aaron Lyall aren't being arbitrarily discounted from our first team squad by the same criteria. They have a less experienced first team squad, but it is evidently a larger one. Like I've already said, I agree that we built a reasonably sized squad and simply redistributing the budget so we carry fewer wingers to allow better defensive depth would be a better use of our resources than running with a considerably larger squad that spreads us thin. This doesn't change the undeniable fact that we have the smallest first team squad in the division.

You are, not for the first time, constructing a gargantuan straw man yourself here. Someone has made a point based on a fact, you have disagreed with the conclusion drawn from that fact, you have decided to dispute the irrefutable fact rather than the conclusion. We have a smaller squad than Airdrie, and everyone else in the division. This is a fact. The average age of Airdrie's squad does not change your factual inaccuracy.

Ah, I didn't realise we could just discount half the Airdrie, Queen's Park, Hamilton and Dunfermline squads on the grounds that all of them have made several pish signings. Do we discount Niall McGinn as having been a first team player for us just because he was absolute mince? Did Jack Bearne and Ally Roy in previous seasons and Lamar Reynolds in this one not count because they found themselves largely bombed out for not being good enough? Regardless of how poor they turned out to be or how little they played they were all signed as first team players, as with several signings for all the squads above. It's true that in Airdrie's case they were forced to scramble for more bodies due to an injury crisis, but it doesn't change the fact they signed them. Whether you discount or include youth players across the board for consistency - if you wouldn't count Keay and Murdoch for us you wouldn't count any similar Queen's Park or Airdrie youngsters - all of these clubs still have more first team players than us. This is an entirely simple and irrefutable matter of fact. As for the rest of it, as you said yourself the issue we had this season was signing too many sand-dancers. I'm not expecting defensive cover the standard of Wilson and Ballantyne (the Grimshaw remark above was flippant), I'm just expecting to have some defensive cover. Rather than needing to put Blues, Gillespie or King at right back whenever Ballantyne's missing, if we could have had an actual back up full back the defence and midfield might not have suffered so much in the event of injuries. We could have taken the wages spent on McGinn and one of Reynolds/Davies, still had no shortage of bodies on the wing and given ourselves better depth in defence and midfield with one signing for those two wages. That wouldn't have limited us any more in the quality we could add to the starting XI, is an eminently sensible thing to do when you know injuries are inevitable, and may have been enough to see us not having such major downturns in form when they happened. This season has been less drastic for it than last, but ultimately two seasons running you can directly trace poor runs of form to a spell without a key player. Having less severe swings of form whenever someone gets injured rather than going straight from promotion challenging form to relegation form could well be the difference between a mid-40s and low to mid-50s points total needed to make a credible playoff challenge that we just couldn't manage this season: we couldn't manage because of poor runs of form prior to signing a credible striker, then without Mullen & Ballantyne, then without Wilson. The approach of putting more of the budget into the starting XI would be the recipe for injuries to relegate us.

Yeah it's obviously ended up being a reasonably sized squad and the imbalance with too many wingers v defenders was an issue, but it is the smallest squad in the division. More because several other clubs have outrageously huge squads than we have a small one.

Every club needs to take the injury history of players into account, and particularly in our case with the smallest squad in the division minerals are clearly a huge concern. In Mullen's case, as with Wilson, their injury records only highlight how important they are to the team and how crucial it is we keep them. We've had 10 league games without Mullen this season and Saturday there was the first win without him. We've conceded 1.06 goals per games with him (only Falkirk and Livingston are better than that defensively) and 2.09 per game without him (no one else is close to being that bad). Meanwhile Wilson being in the team is the difference between promotion playoff challenging form and relegation battling form. We do need better depth so we don't go off a cliff when injuries inevitably happen which is the hardest part of recruitment for any manager and especially a Morton manager, but I'm hopeful with time Murdoch can prove to be a better second choice goalkeeper to Mullen than Woods or MacDonald have been, and we can always dream of a Grimshaw return in midfield.

Murdoch has created a tough decision there with his performance on Saturday. I'd be picking him ahead of Woods anyway if Mullen was the only one injured.

I think on balance if you were judging Adeloye solely on his performances in a Morton top so far rather than prior reputation you'd lean against giving him a contract, but even with how frustrating he's been to watch at times he still has 3 goals in 6 starts and 2 sub appearances. He signed at the end of February having not had a club since the summer and spent a further month out injured after coming in, it's reasonable to look at that record and wonder what goal return he could deliver with a pre-season behind him. Even in games where he has generally been poor and the crowd have been audibly frustrated with Keay not being on in his place much earlier like the Livingston game, both freekicks Crawford had where he scored one and forced a great save from the other came from Adeloye drawing the foul. He's clearly got something and with the struggle to find a competent centre forward we had last summer, I'd rather stick with him than end up waiting until late September for a credible option there again.

Comfortably the better team. We genuinely had about 5 or 6 good chances for 2-0 in the first 20 minutes of the second half, with three of them sitters. As Airdrie started to see more of the ball it felt inevitable that we'd be punished for being that wasteful but other than some predictable pinball from crosses from deep and set-pieces they just weren't very threatening. Crawford was immense today. Murdoch did everything asked of him and didn't look out of place. Gillespie had a very good game too although with the booking subbing him was the right decision. Didn't look good for Ballantyne.

With the state of the relegation battle as it stood before this I'd have liked Hamilton and Queen's Park to survive because there's a higher chance of Dunfermline and Airdrie being good next season while Hamilton won't stave off administration much longer, but they're absolutely getting what they deserve here and it could be argued that 2 points per player is actually a lenient punishment.

I see Niall McGinn will be appearing at hospitality at Hampden on Saturday, when we also have a game. https://x.com/HampdenPark/status/1912518747165729176?t=3hR7MfaaEErsByGQ2YWrbA&s=19 Obviously anything that keeps him from getting on the pitch for us is good news as he's the worst player at the club by a distance, but it sums up his attitude to Morton as well.

People might argue he's not played enough but Wilson has played 26 games altogether which is enough for me, and he's the clear number one. If I was to discount Wilson it'd be Ballantyne or Mullen. Think every other contender has had a sticky spell. Lyall has been tremendous since Christmas but had far more bad games than good before that, Blues didn't really secure a starting place in midfield until December either having started the season on the bench then had a largely torrid time at right back when Ballantyne was out, Baird is another who has been mostly excellent since December but was having a shaky time of it before that. If it was a January onwards award they could well be the top three but when fit Wilson and Ballantyne have been consistently excellent with no bad spells comparable to others, and it’s no coincidence that the others around them were at their best with those two in the team. Went for Garrity for the goal of the season, which is harsh on Blues as that finish v Ayr was outrageous but it was such a lovely strike.

Yeah, Davies did well generally in his brief time on the park and is very hard done by there, he's onside and it's a good finish.

No matter what anyone says about injuries, no one is ever going to convince me that Woods wasn't (entirely correctly) subbed for being fucking rubbish. You really have to make an exceptional cunt of it to be subbed after 32 minutes as a goalkeeper who's only conceded two and is evidently not injured. You have to respect that Imrie will invent an injury to protect him, but he was subbed for being mince and it's no coincidence that the defence became better the second Mullen was on the park, because they had a goalkeeper they could trust to settle their nerves.

I'd definitely put Corr at centre back, whether that's a straight swap with Boyes or Delaney dropping out with Boyes to left back. The club understandably don't post lineups for the under 18s, but I see they won 1-0 last night and that's them won the league: anyone know if Keay played?