Ian Baraclough, the Motherwell manager, doesn’t do negativity.
When he replaced Stuart McCall in the Fir Park dugout last December, there was very little Christmas cheer around the old place, as the rudderless Steelmen languished down at the sticky end of the table.
In such a predicament, most managers would be having sleepless nights about where their next point was coming from.
Not Ian Baraclough. His proclamation on his first day? “Motherwell can win the Premiership!”
After eight months exposure to the Scottish game and with Motherwell being spared relegation through the play-offs, you would think that such a confident veneer would have been chastened somewhat.
Not a bit of it.
Speaking as the club announced a sponsorship deal with Castle Water yesterday, he said: “You have to think that you can go on and win every game.
“Will it happen? We’ll wait and see. But if you go in with the mentality of aiming for fourth, fifth or sixth, then that’s where you will end up.
“A player has to believe he will win every game of football and that’s what we want to happen here.”
What Baraclough is driving at is more to do with instilling a winning mentality throughout his squad and the club as a whole, rather than a warning to champions Celtic that Motherwell are coming for their crown.
Through his positive words and actions, Baraclough intends to harness the feel-good atmosphere around the club since the play-off triumph and use it as a springboard into next season.
"We want to use the momentum from the play-off games against Rangers,” he said.
"The fans went away happy in the end but not with the way the season panned out.
"You can ride a certain wave into this season and the way the campaign finished was as good as anything we could have hoped for on the back of two good performances.
“We need to improve on last year – the club as a whole. We were all disappointed in how it went.
“Everyone wants to be in the shake-up at the end of the season.
"We have kept most of the squad together and the players have come back with a spring in their step.
"We have had a good pre-season and we are pleased with how it has gone.
"We have a tough opening six games but we have to play everybody anyway and we are in a good frame of mind.
"We want to get up and running and it is slightly different because we have not got European football this season to contend with and the injuries that Stuart McCall had to put up with this time last season.”
Baraclough revealed that he is still hoping to do some business after missing out on Celtic midfielder Jackson Irvine, who rejoined Ross County earlier this week.
"He was a player we were interested in,” he admitted, “but we were not close enough in our attempts to sign him.
"We are looking to bolster the midfield and if the right one come along then we will go for it, but if not, then I am content with what I have got [in there].
“We are a couple of players short – definitely a goalkeeper.
“We’ve not jumped in on certain ones and we’ve been left disappointed on others.
“That’s the way it is – everyone’s after good players.”
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