Motherwell lose first home SPL game of the season

Mark McGhee
By grabar
August 17 2008

Despite dominating possession and territory for much of the game Motherwell lost to a late sucker punch goal from Charlie Mulgrew with only five minutes left. Aderdeen's tactics made life hard for Well and reduced them to limited efforts at goal in a poor 90 minutes.

  Saturday's first home game in the SPL was a major disappointment as we failed to break down a stubborn Aberdeen side and fell for the classic sucker punch late on!

We dominated territory and possession throughout the whole game without really creating too much. We can only wonder what might have happened if Paul Quinn's header had beaten Langfield rather than the keeper save it.

The goal was a bit of a shambles with the defensive wall seeming to break up allowing Mulgrew's well hit shot to slip past Smith who had been covering the other side of the goal.

After the game Well boss said, "To win games like that we needed to score and when you don't score things like that can happen.

"It was frustrating, there were things that weren't quite as good as they could have been but there are enough things for us to work on and make a difference for next week.

"We defended better than we did last week and we played well until we got to the edge of the box but we didn't really look like scoring."

Dons boss Jimmy Calderwood defended his side's tactics, "It was a battling performance it was always going to be hard to beat Motherwell and we looked nervous for the first hour.

"They forced us into playing 4-3-3 due to the quality of Steven Hammell which forced us to pull Darren Mackie back. But in general our passing was poor.

"Things got better for us after the first hour and when we got the goal you could see the confidence come back.

"This is a hard team to play for thanks to the expectation levels and today's game was about two good teams who had lost last week and that made it a battle which ended in a vital victory for us."