Simon Donnelly: An apology of sorts

By Iain Hepburn on Aug 16, 08 12:08 PM in players

In common with many Thistle fans, the Row Z Partick Thistle blog may have mistakenly given the impression that Simon Donnelly was a useless, underachieving waste of money who had no place being part of the Jags team and was helping drag the team further towards medocrity.

We now recognise that this is not the case and are happy to put the record straight.

I'm not sure what McCall's said or done to Sid this season, but the lacklustre plodder of the last couple of seasons has gone, replaced by a dynamic bridgehead between midfield and attack, happy to take players on, put in a tackle, win the ball and generally motivate his teammates.

And it's about bloody time.

Donnelly arrived with a bit of fanfare with the Sith Lord Darth Bunnet brought him in two years ago. Despite spending several years keeping the Sheffield Wednesday treatment room busy, most of us remembered Sid from his explosive breakthrough into the Celtic first team - and a certain game against Liverpool in particular. The prospect of that kind of talent in the First Division seemed exciting.

Of course, we never got that. For two years, we never even came close. Oh, the talent was there, but too often Donnelly seemed to give away the ball, miss or pull out of the challenge and generally struggle to justify himself. That penalty miss against Rangers at Firhill last season summed up everything about his career to date - when it was easier to score than miss, someone Sid managed to find another postal district with his shot.

During the summer, when McCall shipped out Stevie Murray but retained Donnelly, I wondered why. Murray, for all he could drift in and out of games, offered us something different. Brought on as a sub, he energised the team in the final periods of a game. From set pieces and from the wing his distribution was impressive. And he was committed like few players at Firhill ever seemed.

(Genuine embarrasing fact 1: First time I was at Firhill since I moved back to Scotland, and saw Murray warming up at half time, I thought he was a ballboy, or that we were getting on Soccer AM's skill school segment and he was one of the kids practicing..)

Anyway, this season Sid's like a different player. Never more emphasized by his performance as a sub in the game against Peterhead in midweek. Ok, so it was Peterhead, and we should have comfortably cuffed them. But Donnelly looked determined to make an influence on the game, at times singlehandedly. And he brought out the best in the players around him, too.

So if you see Sid, tell him I'm sorry