The finish line is in sight for the 2025/26 season. With seven games remaining this campaign, everyone starts to lay out their ideal scenarios between now and the season’s conclusion.
For Captain Paul McGinn, the message is pretty simple. If the team finish below fourth in the table, McGinn would find it hard to hide his disappointment.
And the previous fixture against Hibernian could prove pivotal in the race for European football. And the reality for Motherwell is that for all the praise and acclaim received this year, the proof will be in the pudding.
“This season has been right up there for me this year,” McGinn stated.
“We need to finish strong because there’s no point in being such a nice team and being a side that’s hard to play against. We want to finish high and in a position we feel we deserve. The system this season has been thoroughly enjoyable to be playing in.
“You’ve got so much control of the ball; the defensive side of the game is different. Quite often, you’re going to Celtic or Rangers, and you’re getting 20% possession of the ball, and you’re stretching and defending for your life constantly, whereas this is more us being in control. We’re the ones pressing and in control. It gives you different problems you have to be ready to deal with, but it’s definitely easier.”
Casting his mind back to the early days of Jens Berthel Askou, McGinn admits he wasn’t 100% confident that the system would be effective. That honest recollection of the early days brings a smile to his face when he compares the system then to what it is now.
The Premier Sports Cup group-stage matches against Clyde, Peterhead and Stenhousemuir proved to be three difficult afternoons for the Steelmen, although they got the two wins and a penalty shootout bonus point in the other. But with all three sides sitting deep and proving difficult to break down, McGinn was witnessing first hand how audacious the new approach was and did wonder how it would look when facing Premiership opposition.
“You have your doubts,” McGinn admitted.
“If you had the ball all the time but were getting beat every week, you would start to think that it’s not working. We did huff and puff in the Premier Sports Cup, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about how this was going to work in the league against tougher opposition. But it probably turns out that playing tougher opposition means they opened a bit more, and it suited our game even more.
“I’d say Hertha Berlin was the first game that I felt it could definitely work. I would say the approach is ballsy, yeah. You can come into Motherwell and look at the budget and expectations for the club, and it could maybe be easy to play it safe, but the manager definitely didn’t do that.
“Early on, we worked a lot on the build-up back to the middle quite a lot, and a lot of the pre-season work was on that. I think we did to grips with that quite quickly, but then when you’re playing teams in the Cup that were giving that space up to us, whereas in the league with the likes of Rangers, they would come and press you high.
“So after that we spent a lot of time working on the final third. That’s when you start seeing it coming to fruition, and we started to hurt teams. Confidence comes shortly after that, and the momentum is there. Teams in the Cup group-stage parked the bus and had no pressure on them because the expectation was they would get beat.
“Once it’s in the league, teams are expected to come here and dominate Motherwell at times, or at least have more of the ball, and then they start to get spooked because we start doing it to them.”
It would be fair to say Motherwell have surprised just about everyone who has an interest in Scottish football. Adopting this bold strategy and going down a different route caught many off guard.
However, the approach has paid off with the Steelmen achieving so much this season. A new clean sheet record in a season, achieving top-six football in the first week of March, ending a decade-long wait to defeat Celtic and much more. One thing that hasn’t changed is the demand for integrity and a humble attitude from manager Jens Berthel Askou.
And whilst that demand has been met by all players and staff, the success achieved this season does appear to have ruffled some feathers, which became even more apparent two weekends ago following the defeat to Dundee.
“If teams are getting high praise and others aren’t getting what they think they should, you get that wee bit of anger and bitterness towards you,” the skipper explained.
“You just need to take it as a compliment. We played Dundee, and they were all shouting about how they beat Barcelona after the game, and you just need to take it as a compliment. There’s no point in getting bitter about it. It’s a backhanded compliment, and we’ll take it, and if that’s what’s getting bandied about, we’ll take it.
“We’re only focusing on our next game because we’ve got a hard run to the end. If we finish anything lower than where we are now, I would say it’s a disappointment. That’s what the ambition is now, but we’ve got two good teams that are on our tail now, so we need to work hard to get away.
“It would’ve been surprising to say we’d be disappointed with lower than fourth, having achieved top-six comfortably at the start of the season; you’d have been biting the hand off for that, especially with all the change here. But we’d have underachieved if we moved out of the top four, but it can happen in football. We’ve got a tough run of fixtures. It’s not going to be easy, but no team comes to play us thinking it’ll be an easy victory.”
On a personal level, McGinn is delighted to have featured so regularly. He has only not been available for selection on three occasions all season, and the 35-year-old will make his 300th Premiership appearance by the end of the season if he avoids injuries or suspension.
And with that difficult 24/25 season, which saw the defender spend the majority of the season on the sidelines, which was very much a fluke season for him. And having made his return last season, McGinn was forced off once again in quick succession against Hibernian in January 2025 through injury again. That was his all-time low. But he’s used all his experience to get himself back to a place he’s delighted to be.
“I don’t know how I’ve got back to this, to be honest,” he laughed.
“People can be quick to write you off, but I’m quite lucky with my build. I’m sort of lanky and don’t carry a lot of body fat, but I’ve no idea if that helps. I still feel quick, which helps, and when I start feeling otherwise, I’ll know the time is not far away. As it stands now, I feel as good as I ever have. I’ve managed to stay fit apart from those three games where my groin was a bit sore.
“Not picking up anything has been lucky as well because normally after a bad injury, like I had last year, you pick up two or three after. But the manager has managed me a couple of times, which has been good for me, although I’d have rather played. He’s been good with that as a squad because if he sees someone has played too many minutes, he pulls them out, and he manages them.
“I’d love to have the answer as to how I’ve managed to bounce back, as I could maybe extend my career by two or three years, but I’ll just keep getting on with it and we’ll take it from there.
“I remember coming off as a sub at Hibs thinking that was me done, fully. Andy Halliday will tell you I was in the dressing room saying, ‘That’s me done.’ I thought that was it because it was the same injury that I’d just come back from. But from there, I’d rehabbed it again, and luckily I had a good physio team and surgery team that got me up and running for the second time.
“And even the way they spoke to me, they were confident I was going to be fine, and you need that reassurance sometimes. If you’d offered me to just even be fit this season at the start and not have the success and plaudits from people, I would have taken it. To have gone from one extreme to the other is amazing.
“I don’t take anything for granted, but I do know what football is like. My brother Stephen retired, and I knew that it’s definitely around the corner for me, so you start preparing, but as I said, I’ve still got my pace and am fully fit. I feel great, so hopefully I’ve knocked it down the road a bit.”
