Saturday’s Scottish Cup tie at St Johnstone gives Motherwell fringe players a chance to stake a claim in the first-team, says boss Stuart Kettlewell.
Rather than looking at the negatives of nine first-team players being on the casualty list ahead of the trip to Perth, Kettlewell is looking at the positives and urging his available players to step up and put themselves in his plans.
Goalkeeper Aston Oxborough, winger Jair Javares, defenders Steve Seddon and Liam Gordon, midfielders Lennon Miller and Ross Callachan and strikers Zach Robinson and Apostolos Stamatelopoulos are amongst the walking wounded.
Kettlewell said: “This is a great opportunity to play, to try and keep yourself in the team, and build your profile and have a successful second part of the season.
“I look around the players that are fit and available, I still see good players there. If we can try and make one or two additions to our group I think that will help us.
“It’s never a slight against the injured players, but if I start to focus too much on them, I start to detract my attention from the guys that are available and in a position where they can pay for us just now.
“All those injured players will tell you that they want to play for us just now. They’re desperate to, they’re gutted that they can’t. But we need to focus on who is available, and how we can make that as best possible.”
With a couple of 2-1 wins over St Johnstone already this season, Kettlewell has an idea how Saints will play, while on a run of nine games without a win.
But Kettlewell says progress in the Scottish Cup is motivation enough for his stars.
“St Johnstone are going to try to keep possession, to dominate the ball,” he said. “They’re very expansive, they find themselves very open in possession to try and stretch you, they show a great deal of patience.
“They have that real threat on the counter-attack as well. When you start to take part in the game offensively they have good pace and are dynamic across the pitch, so that’s the type of threat I think they have.
“But you look at some of their games, and I felt we were in that process ourselves at times last season when we went 15 without a win – there were plenty of games where we created chances, maybe didn’t convert them, played well enough, but weren’t quite getting the result.”
Having reached the Premier Sports Cup semi-final before losing 2-1 to Rangers at Hampden, Kettlewell hopes for a similar run.
He said: “We’ve profited from a really good run in the League Cup, and I said after we went out in the semi-final that we’ve got another cup competition – that’s not just to slide under the carpet the one we went out of, but you have that opportunity to try and emulate that.
“You have that opportunity to try and do something similar.
“We all enjoyed that run, that experience, but you always want to try and see if you can take it a step further.
“In playing against Premiership opposition you obviously find a really difficult hurdle in front of you, but one that we will approach as positively and forward-thinking as we possibly can.”