Jim Paterson has backed his former manager Mark McGhee to have the same impact on Motherwell during his second spell in charge of the Fir Park club as he did during his first, when his methods and philosophy helped transform a struggling team bereft of confidence into swashbuckling qualifiers for European competition.

Paterson was one of many Motherwell players who saw their careers transformed under McGhee during his initial tenure there between 2007 and 2009, and he is adamant that his former boss, who he has worked with three times during his career, can repeat the feat with the class of 2015.

He said: “I think he’s a great fit coming back to Motherwell, he’ll give everyone a lift and there are boys there that worked with him in the past that know what he’s all about.

“Hopefully he can restore their confidence like he done with us after we took a battering when Maurice Malpas was in charge, and if the boys there now buy into him like we did then they are too good a team to be struggling.

“He had a massive impact at the club when he arrived, absolutely massive. We were so close to being relegated, so when the boys came in for pre-season we were lower than a snake’s belly.

“He not only picked us up, but turned us into the team that we were, and it is all credit to him.

“From the first day of pre-season he was superb; the way he spoke, the way he organised us and just everything about him was absolutely first-class.”

A cornerstone of McGhee’s success at Motherwell was his insistence on a strict training regime focusing on improving not only the fitness of his players, but also their ball retention skills.

He has already spoken of his current squad of players ‘shipping up or shipping out’, and Paterson confirmed that they have some hard work ahead of them.

“I came back to pre-season in decent nick because for years I had struggled with my fitness,” he said.

“I was lucky that I did, because he wanted everybody under a certain percentage of body fat, and there were a lot of boys that had to do extra running to get that down, so I’m happy that I picked that pre-season to get myself in shape!

“But we also did a lot of ball-work. Don’t get me wrong, we really did run, but that was on individual days and on other days he would make us work with the ball.

“Everything was geared towards us being more comfortable in possession. He got us fit but all the while he was educating us on the way he wanted us to play.

“In the first competitive game against St Mirren we scored a great goal with a one-touch passing move from their corner-kick, and we had worked on that before the game.

“When you look at that from a team of player’s point of view, the manager’s come in, we’ve worked on something, then in the first game of the season it’s worked to perfection and you just think ‘wow’.

“You bought into it straight away, and we went from strength to strength from there.

“All of a sudden we were doing different things like passing drills that were specifically geared towards how we were going to beat teams, and it was always positive and always about us.

“I remember in a pre-season game where we played Dinamo Bucharest, a really decent European team, and he gave our goalkeeper Graeme Smith instructions that he wasn’t allowed to kick the ball out. He had to throw it to the back four, but it was all to get us used to taking the ball at the back.

“We got beat 3-1, but we actually played really well and he wasn’t bothered about the score-line, he was just bothered about when the first game of the season came that we knew how we were going to play.

“The whole experience educated us as players. When you look at the team and the boys that got great moves – myself, Ross McCormack, Chris Porter, David Clarkson - he really did make us all better players.

“We believed in him, and he believed in us.”

Paterson also believes that the way McGhee handled the tragic death of club captain Phil O’Donnell gave a true measure of the man.

“He was first-class as a manager and he’s a first-class person as well,” Paterson said.

“It’s no surprise that when something like the tragedy with Phil came up that he handled it superbly.

“It was an awful situation. Some of us, like me, were really close to Phil, and of course his nephew David was playing in the team.

“It had to be handled so gently, but at the same time we were still a football club and we still had to play games, and the way he handled such a tough situation was unbelievable.

“It just shows you the sort of man that he is as well as being a good football manager.

“The club and the supporters handled it the best they could and together we all managed to get through the season. It was so difficult, and the season could easily have tailed off after such a tragedy, and I suppose that it was a fitting tribute to Phil in the end.

“The manager kept us going through what was such a difficult time.”