dunning1874

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?

It's total nonsense to say that we have a habit of downing tools at this time of the season. Under Imrie so far: 21/22 - in December we'd been a relegation bound rabble who were clear favourites for 10th. Even though we inevitably tailed off from the title winning form of Imrie's new manager bounce, two wins, three draws and four defeats in the final quarter didn't remotely constitute chucking it, it was a solid set of ground out results that got us to safety in 7th with games to spare when everyone would have bitten your hand off for scraping into 8th on goal difference months earlier. 22/23 - we won four and drew one of our last five while only losing once in the whole final quarter, it was an excellent run-in that took us to our highest points total in this division in a decade. 23/24 - we went off a cliff in the whole final third of season because all of Oakley, Wilson, Strapp and Mullen were injured at various points of it and we were a much poorer team if you took any one of them out, never mind two or three at once. That run was disappointing but nothing to do with mentality and everything to do with our lack of depth. It was a regression to the form of the first third of the season when we had the same issues with personnel, the good December to February when all four of them were fit was the blip rather than the other way round. This season we're somewhat less prone to a total collapse in the event of players missing, see the fact we found a way to string a run of three wins together (all in March, when we've supposedly downed tools) despite missing Wilson again. We're clearly a poorer team without him when you look at how performances have dipped since he's been injured, but we managed to string some results together all the same and it's a good thing we've found a way to win without him despite some dire performances, like somehow finding a way to win at Hamilton. Going three games without a win after that isn't because the players have given up. Falkirk are miles ahead of us and Imrie hasn't found a way to deal with them, Partick basically did to us what we'd done to Hamilton and Ayr in staying in the game through a period where we should have buried them and then taking advantage when the momentum swung their way. There was no difference in mentality from those wins to the Partick game, we just weren't clinical and were punished for it. Far from chucking the Raith game, we came back from 2-0 down to lead 3-2; if anyone was giving up that comeback wouldn't have happened. The three of them are also considerably better teams than the Queen's Park and Hamilton rabbles we saw off. The decline in form here didn't start with the Raith game, it started with the draw v Airdrie at home in February - no prizes for guessing who missed that game and hasn't played since. Even taking it back pre-Imrie with 20/21, that was a team that had already gone 10 without a win up to the end of February. There was no collapse from March to May, they were just a shite team who had an even worse manager appointed in March. The last time there was actually any sort of pattern to this happening which couldn't be put down to an obvious non-mental issue was when it happened under Duffy two seasons running, and that deservedly got him sacked.

Yeah there's a bit of a difference between games for fringe players and games for more 17 year olds who haven't reached Keay's level yet. The three I'd be considering starting won't necessarily even weaken the team; Keay has already played really well in previous sub appearances and would be replacing Adeloye who evidently isn't fit. Corr was always signed as a first team player and Boyes has had several shaky performances lately so you could question whether Corr deserves a shot, albeit the passing style makes having two right footed centre backs less than ideal. You could argue those are logical choices to make for putting the strongest possible team on the park anyway. The other shout is Garrity, who I'm just after saying on Tuesday is probably done in the starting XI for the season anyway after too often failing to deliver the same level of performance he manages from the bench, but fuck it, if it's a toss up between him and Shaw...

With the season now done and a 5th or 6th place finish almost certain, bar losing every remaining game and falling into 7th or 8th, time to have an eye on next season with team selections for the last five games. Start Keay every week and see if he sinks or swims. If he's ready to be part of a Championship squad then great, if not then a League 1 or 2 loan next season. Corr's under contract, get him in the team so he has a few more games under his belt. May as well start Garrity to see if he can get over his good from the bench/bad in the starting XI issues as well.