This is an excerpt from this week's McGarry on Motherwell, a free Motherwell newsletter written by Graeme McGarry that goes out every Thursday at 6pm. To sign up, click here.
I used to hold a theory about goalkeepers that if God had wanted them to play football then he wouldn’t have given them two left feet and half a brain.
Of course, this view is rather outdated, and probably germinated around the time when the passback rule was introduced, causing chaos for keepers unaccustomed to having the ball passed to their feet.
Prevailing wisdom would seem to go a step further though, and tell you that many of them were probably only tossed the gloves in the first place because they couldn’t cut it as an outfield player. Again, an outdated perspective.
Goalies these days, as we all know, are expected to be able to do the lot, being safe in their handling and be at least rudimentarily adept at picking out a pass. The weighting of importance of each attribute, of course, depends on the system their manager deploys.
At Fir Park, it seems, the squad contains a goalkeeper in current custodian Calum Ward who has been bedded into the style that his manager has so effectively introduced over the summer, becoming more and more comfortable with the demands being placed upon him as an actual footballer with each passing week.
The trouble is, he has also now arguably cost his side four points from their last two fixtures with horrendous handling errors. The equaliser for Hearts at Tynecastle was bad enough, the ball popping out of his grasp from a routine Harry Milne effort to be smashed home by Claudio Braga, but his clanger against Kilmarnock was on a whole other level.
In a possible first, I had to disagree with the manager’s assessment that there might have been a foul on his keeper as he went up to collect that looping cross from Robbie Deas. Not for me. Ward had to be stronger, and he simply had to collect a ball that had spent about as much time in the air as Amelia Earhart and eventually came down in similarly disastrous fashion.
All the good work in the vast majority of the game (some of which was by Ward himself, admittedly) was once again undone by a basic error, and while that can happen from time to time, it really shouldn’t be happening at this level. And certainly not two weeks on the bounce.
The feel-good factor that has been growing around this Motherwell team since Berthel Askou’s arrival remains intact, but just imagine the momentum that might be building had the side won at Tynecastle and then backed it up with a home win over Killie to be sitting third on eight points. Which, over the piece, they more than merited.
So, does the manager now take Ward out of the team based upon his recent howlers with his hands, and bring in what many in the fanbase would consider a safer bet (certainly in terms of the old-fashioned goalkeeping fundamentals of shot-stopping and actually catching the ball) in Aston Oxborough? Even allowing for the fact that he appears nowhere near as comfortable with the ball at his feet as Ward does?
The injury that Oxborough suffered in pre-season was ill-timed. The big keeper’s only in-game exposure to Berthel Askou’s system and the demands it places on his goalies was a cameo towards the end of the friendly against Hertha Berlin.
It would be a big call to shove him into the game at Dens Park next weekend on that basis, but ironically, it is Ward who has shown that it can be picked up relatively quickly.
Anyone who watched Ward’s performances against FC Twente in pre-season and then to a lesser extent, in the League Cup group stage matches, would have to concede that his distribution and positioning have improved markedly from then to now. Maybe Oxborough could do the same, while being a more reliable bet to perform the traditional nuts and bolts of the role too?
Ward has had a decent opportunity at the start of this season, and regrettably, he has not been able to really show that he can be relied upon as Motherwell’s number one at the moment.
I don’t necessarily think that Berthel Askou will see it that way, but I would have the Ox in for the trip to Dundee, and hopefully we won’t see the brilliantly entertaining football we are all enjoying being undone once again by a huge error.
AND ANOTHER THING…
While he donned the claret and amber way before my time, it was so sad to hear of the passing of legendary Motherwell striker Bobby Graham at the age of 80, yesterday.
My old man used to regale me with tales of the best partnership he had ever seen at Fir Park, that of Graham and a young upstart by the name of Willie Pettigrew, who I was then extremely fortunate to speak to myself many years later on the very subject of their relationship when he was inducted into the Motherwell Hall of Fame.
It remains one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever conducted. It warmed the heart, for instance, to hear that the pair were still traipsing along to games together in recent years, and remained firm friends. You can read the end result here:
Motherwell’s dynamic duo still intact as Willie Pettigrew enters Fir Park hall of fame
Bobby would of course, as Willie predicted, follow him into that exclusive club of Fir Park legends in 2022. He will be sadly missed.
RIP, Bobby Graham.
