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Making his Premiership debut for the steelmen in the 00/01 season, it wouldn’t take long before a young wee Stevie would claim that left back spot as his own. He would go on to make 518 appearances across all competitions, taking the well bois all across Europe in fights to qualify for Champions League and Europa League group stages. He would feature against the likes of Panathinaikos, Levante, Stjarnan, Nancy, Kuban Krasnador and Steaua Bucharest to name a few.

Stevie’s debut was made at Pittodrie in the April of 2000 under manager Alex McLeish, a similar setting to where he would manage his first game in charge as permanent manager. He would leave Motherwell in 2006 to join Southend but would re-join the well in January 2008 to replace Jim Paterson who left to join Plymouth Argyle.

Hammell would make his 500th appearance to the club in April 2014 and is now Motherwell FC’s post war record appearance holder after retiring in the January of 2018 to take up a position as Academy Director, where he would work until taking the reins from his predecessor Alexander after a poor second half of the 21/22 season and two embarrassing results in European games against Sligo Rovers.

Hammell made just one appearance for Scotland way back in 2004, in a 4-1 defeat to Sweden, but would get his second call up in the summer of 2013 for games against Croatia and England. This jersey featured is from the Croatia game where Hammell would unfortunately not see any game time but still done enough in training to warrant another call up the following October. Hammell would also play 12 times for Scotland under-21’s and twice for Scotland B team.

Stevie’s tenure as Motherwell manager has been short so far but we all know that he understands the club’s values and would give his all for us. He has got the team playing some really sharp football and I definitely look forward to the future head as a Motherwell fan.

Looking all the way back to eighteen years ago to 12/02/03, we would find a young Northern Irish lad receive his first international cap in a 1-0 defeat at the hands of Finland.

From then on Craigan would receive an impressive 54 international caps from 2003 to 2011 while racking up some impressive victories such as a 1-0 win over England in 2005 and a 3-2 victory over Spain in 2006, who would go on to become European champions from this Euro 2008 qualifying group.

Over the course of the Euro 2008 qualifiers, Craigan would go unbeaten from the 06/09/06 win over Spain to the 21/11/07 where Spain would get their revenge. In this time, Northern Ireland would beat Denmark, Sweden, Lichtenstein twice and Latvia while drawing with both Scandinavian teams as well. During this time however Craigan was unfortunately dropped for what should have been an easy away game to Latvia, Northern Ireland lost 1-0 and proved how crucial he was to the Northern Ireland set up.

These two jerseys here are both from Northern Ireland’s 2004 Caribbean tour where they played against St Kitts and Nevis, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. They only team they didn’t beat were Barbados who they drew with 1-1.

He has also held his own against some of the worlds best such as playing against a young Robert Lewandowski in 2009, Raul, David Villa and Fernando Torres in 2006, Andrea Pirlo in 2010, Zlatan Ibrahimovic in 2007, Dimitar Berbatov in 2006 as well. However none of these generational talents compare to the numerous times he’s faced my dad at badminton over the years.