McGhee grants Moult permission to inject pain away
MOTHERWELL manager Mark McGhee is ready to let hitman Louis Moult be patched up to face Rangers this Saturday, despite previously ruling him out of the match with a groin injury.
Speaking after his side’s friendly defeat to Hibs on Sunday, McGhee said that his top scorer from last season would sit out their League Cup curtain-raiser against Mark Warburton’s men.
After a plea from the player during the week though, McGhee has suggested that he will allow the Motherwell medical team to manage the player’s pain in order to get him on the field.
“If he can get a painkiller injection that doesn’t cause any damage or exacerbate the problem going forward, it’s fine,” said McGhee.
“When I was at Hamburg, my God, the Germans were brilliant at giving injections. It really never did me any harm.
“It got me out there and I loved injections if they improved things. So I am one who will support that as long as it’s not detrimental to the long-term recovery of the player.”
Despite McGhee’s willingness to let his player take pain-killing injections in order to play, he is keen to get to the bottom of Moult’s injury so that he can get back to his ruthless best.
The striker saw a specialist for the second time yesterday, and it is hoped that they can shed some light on what is causing the player’s discomfort.
“We had him seen and he was given the all-clear,” McGhee said.
“[Physio] John Porteous gave us some names of conditions I can’t even say; we thought a hernia or something was giving him disruption. But it’s all clear. And yet Louis is still not feeling right. We are getting a second opinion to dig a bit deeper and see what is going on with him.
“Even at the end of last season, I felt Louis had lost his edge. I expected him, with six or seven games to go, to kick on and get over 20 goals, and he kind of tailed off a wee bit.
“I wondered at the time if it was just fatigue, but I think it must be more than that. We need to get to the bottom of it.”
The injury problems of Moult are just one concern for the Steelmen ahead of tomorrow’s clash with Rangers, with a patchy set of pre-season results culminating in a 4-1 hammering at Easter Road.
McGhee played down the significance of the friendly defeats his side have endured, vowing that his players will be all the more ready for this weekend’s clash having learned from their mistakes.
“You know what pre-seasons are like,” he said. “Somebody asked me the other day about the Albion Rovers game, and I couldn’t even remember what the score was. That’s the God’s-honest truth, it’s irrelevant.
“The Hibs game was a wee bit different. The score was irrelevant, but the performance wasn’t irrelevant. The was concerning.
“We’ve went away and looked at it again, and we had a little meeting with the defenders about the Hibs game, and we actually all came out of it feeling a lot better about ourselves.
“When we looked at it again, it didn’t look anything like we usually look in terms of the defensive shape that we would normally be in. We took reassurance from that in the sense that we hadn’t suddenly become rubbish players or rubbish management.
“Hopefully this week we’ll go back to a more rigid and a more constructed way of defending that will help us be much more difficult to beat against Rangers.” performance