dunning1874

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.

Lyall has been excellent since Christmas and that's vindicated Imrie’s decision to persist with him prior to that when he had about two good games in half a season, but it's not like he was some massive coup of a signing who could demand games. His prior first team experience was 18 games for Airdrie and 9 of them were as a sub.

Not easy to predict our lineups lately, no one guessed the team on Tuesday night, but my best guess would be Blues in for Garrity as the only change. Personally I'd like Gillespie in for Shaw as well and push Crawford forward, but don't see it.

That was the bit I took notice of: so on one hand he's complaining about how he was treated, but at the same time saying he couldn't be arsed getting in shape until he moved on to another club? I never really saw his weight as an issue, but he's the one who brought it up.

Seeing their third goal again, it confirms there is absolutely no chance Mullen should be leaving his line for it. That cross isn't even close to being a keeper's ball and in the pinball of headers that follows coming charging off his line at any point would be a stupid thing to do, he's done nothing wrong there and made a brilliant save to boot.

If Raith had a real goalkeeper playing tonight who didn't somehow let a shot he shouldn't even have needed to parry rather than holding first time sneak in no one would be defending Shaw's performance. He was the epitome of everything wrong with the performance in the first 20 minutes, with an added bonus of repeatedly standing still watching Raith players pick up loose balls that were about 75/25 in his favour. The final act of the game being him putting a simple pass to Ballantyne in space on the wing miles away from him and out for a throw summed his night up, but having a shite game is a thing that no player is immune to, and if you're still going to be capable of delivering an end product with a goal on a bad night then that's an extremely useful thing for any player, particularly a winger. His laziness is a different issue that urgently needs addressed if he's going to be on the park, because we simply can't carry that. The last few games where we've seen both Moffat and Shaw have spells at centre forward have really shown up the difference in workrate, as Moffat absolutely runs himself into the ground even in spells where he's getting little service or reward for his efforts and Shaw just doesn't run full stop. He clearly has the ability to deliver an end product at this level but he needs to find the workrate to match it. Maybe more time working with Imrie is going to deliver a Muirhead style conversion into a double figure player but the attitude shift hasn't appeared yet. I do also think we've reached the point with Garrity that he's lost his shot at the starting XI for the rest of the season. Too many times he's had a few excellent sub appearances in a row - with so much of an end product in those sub appearances that he's our joint top scorer with Stuparevic, despite other attacking players having far more time on the park and only one of his goals coming in a game he started - then been rewarded with a start and had a shocker. He was really poor tonight, just consistently making the wrong decision on the ball whenever he didn't make a mess of trapping it, but not being deserving of a start himself doesn't mean he's deserving of the same type of criticism as Shaw. There's absolutely no question about his workrate, his issue is turning his talent into consistency and performing for 90 minutes rather than just the last 20-25 with fresh legs.

Are we seriously talking about dropping Mullen here when the first goal was far more on Boyes and the third was a rebound from his wonder save that the defence failed to react as quickly as Raith players to, when we'd already had the chance to deal with it and two players have headed it back into trouble before he made that excellent save? I need to see the second again, but if he should have done better then you're literally talking about his only mistake to give away a goal in months. We'd still be in the relegation battle without him, in the 8 games with another keeper in goal we've conceded 15 and won none of them.

Assuming we don't count Ray McKinnon, it's Tommy McLean in 1984. Partick were reportedly after John McCormack in 2003 when they sacked Gerry Collins but no idea how close that came to happening.

Yeah I'm not necessarily saying every single manager in that time period was a dud, but the bad far outnumber the good.

I don't think it's remotely fair to expect Mullen to do better for the goal, it's a terrific cross into an area that makes it very difficult for a goalkeeper to come for and once Rudden's in the air I don't think you can reasonably say Mullen should deal with it. Maybe Baird could back pedal a bit and try to get his head on it but again, it's just a really good ball in and that's sometimes going to take a centre back out the game when there's not actually anything wrong with his positioning. You could ask whether Boyes could have been tighter to Rudden as well but for the most part Baird and Boyes were both excellent on Saturday, especially good to see in Boyes' case after how bad that wobble a few weeks ago was, so don't think overanalysing either of them over that goal from that good a cross is particularly necessary. Allowing the room for the cross in the first place is the biggest issue IMO. Do agree that Mullen's distribution was weirdly poor. I'd go as far as saying he's comfortably the best keeper I've seen at Morton with the ball at his feet normally so hopefully just a one off bad day rather than having a niggle that's affecting his kicking.

The longer Imrie stays here the less likely it seems that he's going to get a move to the top flight, and therefore the more likely it is that he takes what we'd perceive as a sideways move to another Championship club but where he'll have a far larger budget to work with. Rightly or wrongly, bottom six Premiership clubs aren't going to sit up and take notice of a manager finishing 5th in the Championship, even when being close to it we can see that's consistently involved doing a more impressive job than managers finishing above us. If we're around our ceiling currently in competing for the top four with consistently one of the two smallest budgets in the division, it's entirely understandable that Imrie will back himself to go and win a title if he gets even a mid-table budget and so go looking for an opportunity to get that budget. You'd also hope that any manager in that scenario would be clever enough to see what way the wind is blowing with clubs. Queen's Park for example would give him a far larger budget initially, but that is clearly built on sand and it's a matter of time until that club financially implodes. Maybe in the meantime he could get them promoted anyway, but that would still be a bad choice, just as it was clear last season that even if Inverness had stayed up they were going to end up in administration sooner rather than later and any promises of more money to work with wouldn't last. If it's a club like Partick or Dunfermline, then even if they actually have the sense to cut back to a sustainable level of spending they could still provide a bigger budget, so though you'd hate seeing him go you couldn't deny he'd be doing what was best for his own career. There is absolutely no point getting fatalistic about this though. It is blatantly not true that he's been offered the Partick job already because they haven't appointed a Sporting Director yet. If he's applied for it then whatever, he'll continue to do his job in the meantime. We have people having these sort of panics every single season: he's going to walk because of a fallout over the budget (repeated annually), he's got the Inverness job, he's got the Ayr job. He wasn't even a year in the job when we had fans demanding club statements about Imrie's future because tabloids were reporting rumours of Hamilton sacking Stuart Taylor, as if that would be remotely appropriate for Morton to comment on. It'll happen one day, in the meantime enjoy having a manager who's actually doing a good enough job that a move to other clubs is even credible after 25 years of repeated duds.

We should really have had that game out of sight at half-time, which was a concern when we'd only been turning up for 45 minutes in recent weeks, but despite the nerves that naturally creep in we really did totally control that game. An accurate reflection of that game would have been a 4 or 5-1 win rather than 2-1, but even at that they didn't remotely threaten our box at any time after pulling one back. There are 10 credible man of the match candidates today and one of them didn't even start. I'm starting to think that Owen Moffat is actually a better centre forward than a winger, he's looked a much better player since moving there due to us literally not having one. It's entirely natural as a fan to panic when you're only a goal up in the final 10 minutes of a game, but I genuinely don't think a Queen's Park player trapped the ball in the final third once after they pulled it back to 2-1. There was a wee bit of ping pong at the edge of the box after a hoof with 5 minutes to go but it's possibly the most comfortable one goal lead I've ever had the pleasure to see.

On the long shot that we're actually going to achieve a points total that puts us in contention for 4th, which still requires title challenging form from here, we'd need to be taking 4 points from Raith anyway and realistically leaving them in the dust barring them winning all their other games, so we'd have been better off with a Raith win last night and having Partick drop as many points as possible. They still have all of Airdrie, Hamilton and Dunfermline to play.

Expecting a return to a back four from the start here after how quickly the back three was abandoned last week with Corr still suspended, but the logical choice at centre forward in that scenario would be Keay, assuming neither Adeloye or Reynolds are available, and he started for the under-18s last night. Unclear if he was subbed early, but he scored a first half hattrick to have us 3-1 up at half-time then didn't score again in a 7-1 win so maybe he was off after 45 minutes, but he's not going to start two games in 17 hours regardless. I get we maybe still want to manage his minutes at 17 and not fling him in to play 90 minutes in every game for the rest of the season, whether to protect him from pressure, keep his feet on the ground or manage his physical development, but he's the best option today. Moffat works hard there but isn't a striker never mind a lone one and we already know Davies is far better on the wing. Could Garrity get a shot there again? Once again no idea what this team is going to look like. Parking the centre forwards issue, if it is back to a 4-3-3 then Garrity and Davies both did well on the wing last week while Shaw has had a few poor games in a row with his end product drying up, but we've also been here before this season with both of them doing really well off the bench then not delivering when rewarded with a start. Decision to made on the 3 in the middle as well with needing Gillespie to shore it up defensively after the change of formation last week, but Blues, Lyall and Crawford all deserving places in the team. lf Gillespie's dropped then Blues and Crawford sitting, if not and one of them's being moved forward to play on the wing, please make it Crawford this time rather than Blues who is wasted out wide.