Season thows up usual thrills
With the international week now taking almost an eternity, it’s as good a time as any to cast our eye over the first quarter of the club season.
It’s been an interesting start in the Ladbrokes Premiership with a few surprise packages – and a familiar club on top.
Celtic’s record-breaking run has been welldocumented with Brendan Rodgers’side continuing to clock up the wins. Although the champions have dropped points at home, Rodgers’ men sit three points ahead of the chasing pack and will most likely be streets ahead by the time May comes around.
But below them the league is throwing up its usual thrills and spills.
A third of the sides have already changed their manager with Hearts pressing the panic button before Ian Cathro could get a league game under his belt.
The writing was always on the wall for Lee McCulloch after a poor start but the sackings of Jim McIntyre and Billy Dodds were much more of a shock.
Over at Ibrox, the Pedro Caixinha experiment was also binned with Rangers directors taking no chances after a stuttering start to the league campaign and European humiliation.
Directors have swapped young and hungry coaches for gaffers with much more experience in Craig Levein, Owen Coyle and Steve Clarke.
Whether Rangers decide to go for another leftfield appointment to replace Caixinha or a “safe pair of hands”like Aberdeen’s Derek McInnes remains to be seen.
But it should be the Dons and Rangers fighting it out for second place while trying to keep the points gap to Celtic down to a respectable level.
So what of Stephen Robinson’s Motherwell?
If you had said to any Steelmen supporter in July that the club would be sitting in the top six and in a cup final they would have bitten your hand off.
I said in this column at the start of the season that if‘Well could keep hold of Louis Moult they would have a chance of finishing in the top half of the table and I still stand by that.
A number of Robinson’s shrewd signings also look to be paying dividends.
The likes of Peter Hartley and Cedric Kipre
Shrewd signings look to be paying dividends