You know, thank
goodness for all of the politics. If it
wasn’t for that, I’d be up the wall with how bad we’ve been…
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| St Mirren players troop off after their 5-0 defeat to Motherwell |
The split has
come and there are still issues to be decided.
Celtic are comfortably ahead of Aberdeen in the championship race but
still need to cross the finish line while the playoff place needs to be
decided. This leaves us with the team
scheduled to be relegated on Saturday.
At home, where they’ve only won once all season, against Kilmarnock.
Any time I’ve
seen St Mirren this season, they reminded me of the reaction to the English cricket team touring Australia in the winter of 1986/87 – “There's only three things wrong with this England team - They can’t bat, can’t bowl and can’t field”. Well, St Mirren’s version was, can’t defend,
can’t score and no grip in midfield. We
were already light at the back and in no way, shape or form did Goodwin &
McAusland ever… ever look like a Premier
League standard defensive partnership.
Ellis Plummer being a very young player looked out of place from the
start, though to be fair I thought that he did have promise perhaps as a
defensive midfielder. St Mirren’s season
on the pitch was built on the disaster that was the Goodwin/McAusland
partnership. The worst defence in the country
by a mile and guaranteed to provide one defensive blunder a game to boot.
We couldn’t score
because, well, we had strikers that simply did not look Premier League
class. Then again Calum Ball (who seemed
to get more game time than James Marwood) just looked totally unfit and not up
to the pace of Premier League football.
Not having Steven Thompson for half/most of the season hasn’t helped but
then again neither has the performances in midfield. That and the fact that our best performer, Kenny McLean, left in Aberdeen’s swagbag at the end of the Winter transfer
window. In his place we did get Alan
Gow, a player who knocked us back twice and really shouldn’t have gone for
third time lucky such has been his impact.
McLean apart, our
Midfield has had no grip whatsoever.
John McGinn looks to have gone backwards this season, probably not
helped by not having an experienced older head along side him. The only time the midfield has looked solid
has been when Issac Osborne has been fit, and that was only for about 5 games
in November. Meanwhile both of our
wingers, Gregg Wylde and Adam Drury have looked distinctly uninterested by it
all. Drury disappeared during the Winter
transfer window while Wylde is still here.
The one bright spot has been Steven Mallan, who has put in a couple of
good performances but is too young to put together any consistency.
If that is a brief
synopsis of what has gone wrong on the sporting paddock, that tells half of the
story. At the end of last season the
Board decided not to renew Danny Lennon’s contract, and instead appointed his
assistant Tommy Craig as manager.
However your opinion of Lennon (mine was that it was possibly time to
get a new manager as his team was looking tired and the life span of managers
is normally 4 years anyway – Gutmans Law so to speak) the appointment of Craig
smacked of being a halfway house in that the board were not sure whether to get
rid of Lennon or to get a new manager.
Instead of being the new broom, a fresh pair of eyes on the first team,
we got continuity Lennon. Instead of a
young hungry manager or someone with a bit more experience, we got an old
experienced coach who would have been better off staying as coach.
The BBC’s Tom
English rightly fingers the Board for their decision making, particularly in
the last year, saying they were “asleep at the wheel”. Within English’s piece, there is also an
element that for a club that was given at the end of the last decade a
foundation stone in the shape of the new stadium and coaching facilities, that
this has been squandered. Encapsulated
within this is that fact that among the plethora of attacking players that have
pitched up at Greenhill Road and then disappeared, tail between legs, the last experienced
out and out central defender St Mirren signed was Lee Mair in 2009. In a sport where defence is the cornerstone
of a good team, that statistic says it all about St Mirren’s not very dramatic
fall from the Premier League.
