Tasty: Could Masterchef pair Torode and Wallace stomach the football Motherwell have served up? Pic: © Brian Minkoff-London Pixels
Stick with me on this one, but I'm comparing MFC to cooking and baking this week...
While Rangers had a cake walk against Motherwell last week, I was baking bread. There was no return to Ibrox for me after the 4-1 defeat back in October, so instead I took it upon myself to add to my culinary repetoir.
By the time I'd taken the ingredients out the bag, Naismith had put us a goal behind. About 20 minutes in to the radio coverage, I decided I'd make a start on my first attempt at breadmaking. Along with blogging, being a football fanatic and new hockey enthusiast, cooking has become one of my other new found passions.
So a Saturday spent in my kitchen, listening to my team get horsed was on the cards. By the time Jones and Sutton had squandered our best chances of the game, I had made one failed attempt at my bread mix due to the dodgy recipe on the back of the yeast box.
By 2-0 and then 3-0, I'd reached the correct consistency, after taking out my rage at the team's capitulation on kneading my dough. During half time, I had another bash at a second loaf, which came together with some ease, having perfected it on the second attempt.
By the time they went in the oven, it was 4-0 and by the time they came out, all golden and smelling class, it had become 6-0. If you add my two perfect loaves to that, then technically it was only a 6-2 weekend in my eyes and once I added the steak and onions and the garlic and chilli wedges to the loaves for myself and the missus, I consoled myself at it technically being 6-4...
The next morning, I awoke and decided I would make some baps. After all, I was now a master baker (leave it) and the kitchen was my culinary oyster. Another perfect dough, shaped in to five bread balls and fired in the oven for 25 minutes.
Skulked back in to the bedroom to watch a bit of Tim Lovejoy and his baldy cooking pal disregard their scripts to talk about Liverpool and Chelsea as usual.
Twenty-five minutes later I returned to the kitchen and had to hurl myself through the thick cloud of smoke and scent of burning yeast that had permeated from the oven. My total disregard of increased surface area and smaller sizes of dough had meant that I'd cremated what I'd hoped would be the perfect soaker upper of my gran's soup.
As five charred, hard boulders of bread lay on my baking board, I couldn't help but feel that I'd let myself down, like Motherwell had done the day before. I'd become complacent and cocky after performing so well before hand, that I hadn't prepared for the difference a change in tactics would make. Had I stuck to a specific recipe, I'd have had some lovely baps. Instead, I tampered with it and made a big smoky mess.
With the way that my mind works, I couldn't help but compare it to the recent state of affairs at Fir Park. While far from being the perfect recipe, Brown and Knox had been capable of running the proverbial kitchen fairly smoothly, serving up satisfying fare that sometimes lacked in presentation.
After they left, Stuart McCall came in and had to impose his own techniques and recipes to meet and exceed the standards of his predecessors. In the 10 games he'd had in charge, the ingredients had not been working well together and his experiments had not always tasted as good as they could have.
His best dish had been served at Hampden two weeks previous and a second helping at Ibrox would have been delightful. Instead, we served up an unappetising buffet, which Rangers rightly chewed up and spat out (I am getting in so many food puns and cliches here).
Come Tuesday evening though, the Ibrox shocker failed to repeat on the team. Instead, McCall served up fare of the highest calibre. Despite the early dirty fork of Aluko's goal, the Well managed to cut through Aberdeen like a hot knife through butter on many occasions, despite only managing to get level through Franny Jeffers headed goal.
In what was always going to be a match simmering with bite, it threatened to boil over when Hartley was red carded after Keith Lasley almost broke the Aberdeen skippers face with a hefty leading arm. Las was lucky, but that fight and determination is what we needed. When Murphy ran on to the headed through ball, outmuscled the ridiculous ponytail of his marker and dispatched the ball under Langfield, I thought "There's Your Dinner!"
They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, and at a freezing Pittodrie it defnitely was. While Brown and Knox munched on their sour grapes, Stu Mac and the lads can safely dine out on getting one over on the old regime and relish the most important result of the season so far.
I apologise profusely for all the food-isms in there, but what I'm getting at is that, while Motherwell FC will never be in contention for a Michelin Star, we need to be serving up platters like Wednesday night on a more regular basis. While we can forgive an occasional poor service, something sumptuous and exciting and hunger sating is much more appreciated.
We know we can do it, we just need to offer it more often.
Up The Well!
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