While the full story may never come out, Craig Paterson can see why Motherwell called it quits with jim Gannon.

jim gannon
Craig Paterson understands the reasons behind Motherwell's decision to remove manager Jim Gannon from the club for refusing to sign a contract. The Fir Park club ended the agreement with the former Stockport boss today with a statement posted on their official site claiming his refusal to sign a contract on several occasions showed he was not committed to the club and that "relations between the manager, staff and directors deteriorated to the extent that the situation became untenable." Motherwell were not blaming recent results, the club have gone seven games without a win, with chairman John Boyle at pains to stress that recent results were not in "any way whatsoever" behind the decision. Paterson, who played in Motherwell's 1991 Scottish Cup winning team and is now a football pundit, said that although he was surprised to hear the news, the reasoning behind it makes sense to him.

He went on: "The news did come as a surprise to me, I thought Gannon was here for the long haul. I saw his first game against Llanelli in the Europa League qualifier which they lost and I thought he was in for a long, hard season. But he had a remarkably good start to the SPL season and his young players and loan players did well. That's seven games without a win though, and if you don't have the experience in the team then these bad runs can go on and on. But I thought he would try and battle through because he has been there before at other clubs. However, it looks like the club have been trying to get him to sign a contract for a while and at this point they must have asked themselves 'What do we do?' They must have felt they couldn't let the situation go on, and that Gannon's reluctance to sign a contract meant he saw his future elsewhere. So the club have probably said, 'Let's get this done now before it's too late.' It will be interesting to see if the loan players will want to stay at the club or whether they just came to Motherwell because of Jim Gannon."

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