IN the end, something just had to give at Motherwell. After the insipid defeat to Raith Rovers on Saturday, Steven Hammell’s position as manager - long hanging by the thinnest of threads – was no longer tenable.
Any notion that the Motherwell board would remain sympathetic to a man who is undoubtedly a club legend was dispelled when Hammell didn’t trap for his post-match press duties. In truth, it is perhaps his status at Motherwell, earned after so many years of sterling service as a player, that allowed him to limp on this long.
It would have given the Fir Park hierarchy no pleasure in relieving Hammell of his duties. For the fans who revere him, there was a bittersweet mixture of relief and regret. Relief that their club have finally taken decisive action in an attempt to halt a seemingly inexorable slide towards relegation, and regret that Hammell’s long association with their club has ended in such ignominious fashion.
The wounds from the last few months will heal in time, and Hammell will remain a storied figure in Motherwell’s modern history. For those who remain at the club though, the process of sifting through the wreckage and somehow pulling themselves together will be a painful one.
For the players, the coming days should also include a serious amount of self-reflection. Stalwarts of this team have now seen two coaches off the premises in seven months, and as a collective, they have been underperforming for well over a year now.
Among those is captain and goalkeeper Liam Kelly, badly at fault for Raith’s second goal on Saturday from Sam Stanton, and culpable too in failing to keep out Isma Goncalves’s third. At least, as skipper, he fronted up after the game, and recognised his own individual shortcomings as well as those of the team as a whole.
His voice cracking with emotion, Kelly said: "Individually and collectively, it wasn't good enough. I can't say anything about anyone else when I'm performing like that. The responsibility is on us as players, we gave away terrible goals at terrible times.
"I'm gutted, embarrassed and really disappointed. We were desperate to win the game, absolutely desperate, but we weren't good enough.
"We are absolutely desperate to get it right, but confidence is low right now, that's there for everyone to see. They were the opposite because Raith Rovers just got to a cup final, and you could see the difference.
"I wasn't good enough so I am in no position to talk about anyone else.
"We are getting beat all the time. We are letting the fans down so badly, we know this. Absolutely we are aware of that. We don't like losing games, do you think we want to lose games?
"We have family here at the games, we go home to our families who have watched us get beat every week. We don't want that. It's just gutting.”
Kelly accepts that the players are the ones who should carry the can for Motherwell’s failures so far this season, but as is customary in football, it was ultimately Hammell who paid the price.
"The manager is a really good guy and we have let him down massively,” he said.
“He has done everything he could for us. He prepared us right, we knew how big a game it was - we are grown men and we knew how much this meant to the club to get to a quarter. We have let him down massively.
"He's been fair to a lot of us who have gone through poor form and he's kept us in the team.
"Every single one of us have let him down. We concede too many goals and don't score enough goals. There's not one person in there can say they've done their job.
“We need to get a grip and drag each other through it because nothing is decided yet."
In terms of Motherwell’s 38-year long unbroken run as a top-flight club, that much is true. Remarkably, given their abysmal form, the Steelmen are still right in the mix with three other clubs at the wrong end of the table. And they have a game in hand on two of them. If they can somehow pull themselves together to get a result in that one, they can haul themselves out of the relegation play-off spot.
"We have St Mirren on Wednesday and they aren't going to hang about and feel sorry for us,” Kelly said. “We need to get our confidence back somehow.
"The supporters have got no right to come out in the numbers they did [on Saturday], but they did. They've got no right to come out on Wednesday and support us, but they will because that's how good they have been.
"We need them now more than ever. The boys are devastated, we have let the club, manager and supporters down."
