April 2004
Monday, April 5
9pm
Ricky’s report of the Rangers game is now available.
Terry Butcher’s port-match comments were as follows:
“Thats the second week running weve played very well. I thought the boys were tremendous today. We made a lot of chances and were going to smash some team seven or eight, hopefully its on Wednesday.
“I thought we played well, it was a scrappy second half, we kept going and changed the system round and still had opportunities. Theyve had two chances and scored from one of them and the Mols one might even have been a hand ball, Martyn Corrigan says it was a hand ball, it was a good save by Gordon Marshall.
“I cant ask any more from the players, they are a tremendous bunch of professionals. I had to make changes, Keith Lasley is off now with mumps thats be a couple of weeks at least. Scott McDonald has an Achilles problem so I dont know what he is going to be like this week. He has done very well since we signed him, he has been tremendous.
“I also thought that Phil ODonnell was different class as. There were players playing their first game for a while Stevie Craig, Phil ODonnell and Jason Dair hasnt been playing all that often. We were down to the bare bones we had a very young bench but I thought they were tremendous a credit to themselves.
“Im just disappointed we didnt score as we created a lot of chances, same as last week when we had a lot of chances and didnt score.
“Sloppy goal to lose, we never seem to score sloppy goals, it needs to be the most perfect goal in the world for us to score. But Ill take a sloppy goal any time, but it was a soft one to concede as I thought we had done very well in the first half. Klos is man of the match as was Paul Gallagher last week so if we play like that well win the one game we need and hopefully itll come on Wednesday. We are so tantalisingly close to reaching that top six, its nearly within touching distance but were not there yet.”
Reports today suggest that we remain well on course to come out of administration in the immediate future, possibly even by the end of the month. The club are back in court next Wednesday at the conclusion of the 28-day period for creditors to launch an appeal, however no objections are expected. A club spokesman is quoted as saying:
“It’s well down the road, everybody has voted for it, so it would be amazing if there was a hiccup,” a spokesman said. After the creditor meetings there is a 28-day period in which people can lodge appeals and say that they don’t like the way it’s been handled. So far nobody has lodged any appeals, so the club goes back to the court on 14 April and ask the court to allow them to come out of administration. That takes probably another week or so to get all the paperwork done.”
Once the club is out of admin, TB will begin discussing new deals with the players who are out of contract at the end of the season. The spokesman continued:
“The first step is to get out of administration and once that is done well will look at the rest of these issues. Contracts are up to the manager and then consultation will have to be made with the board.”
Motherwell have vowed to ban the supporter who threw a coin at Frank de Boer during the second half of yesterday’s match against Rangers, although the SFA today hinted that we would probably escape any punishment for the incident. A spokesman for MFC said today:
“As far as I know it’s been mentioned in the referee’s report. We’re looking into it to see what can be done. Both clubs are asked for a written comment and these will be passed on to the disciplinary committee. They would take a view on it, but more often that not the club has done everything in their power to stop these things. They do everything possible to stop them, but it still manages to happen. It’s obviously easy to have coins in your pocket, but we are usually satisfied that security measures are in place. All we can do is make sure that clubs impose sanctions and that adequate measures were used.”
Today’s Daily Express reported that the club have signed a six figure shirt sponsorship deal with Zoom Airlines, a Scottish based firm partly owned by John Boyle. Rumour has it that we will even be launching a new third strip next season in Zoom’s blue and white corporate colours. JB wanted his company’s logo on our shirts before the end of this season, but our existing deal with The Untouchables means that he will have to wait until the new campaign gets underway.
Cast your vote in our TWO new opinion polls:
and