It Must Be Love Street

  The Rollercoaster Despair and delight are familiar bedfellows when you're a St Mirren supporter. Not only will you experience both, they are frequently in close companionship, capable of arriving almost simultaneously. To go from being absolutely disconsolate on Sunday, following our defeat to Livingston in the League Cup, to complete jubilation by Wednesday evening, after going to Tannadice and winning 5-1, sums up what it means to be a football fan. It's a rollercoaster but in times like these, football provides the sustenance to keep many people, including myself, going. Ultimately, the emotional resonance the club and the sport hold is why we love the game. It Was On The Cards... I'm certainly not a talented gambler, far from it, but our defeat on Sunday really seemed inevitable. A palpable sense of foreboding engulfed me all weekend; I stuck a blasphemous tenner on Livingston to advance to the final against St Johnstone. Our prior defeat to the Perthshire side sugges...

 St Mirren: Switching To Two Strikers . . . And How It Could Work(?) St Mirren have scored once in both league matches of 2021 which, considering neither were lost and the opposition was Kilmarnock away followed by a Motherwell side with a new manager and new goalkeeper, doesn't sound so bad. Dig a little deeper and the picture becomes slightly more concerning.  Our goal against Kilmarnock was a fluke, a horrendous goalkeeping error which surely won't be repeated. We were denied a stonewall penalty for handball at Rugby Park, yet our goal against Motherwell was an unbelievably generous penalty award, and would have enraged Saints  if given against us. This was one of only two shots on target - the other was a decent yet fairly comfortable freekick from Ilkay Durmus. Our shoot on sight policy never troubled Liam Kelly. We can be satisfied that we didn't deserve to lose either game; simultaneously, it's hard to argue we merited a victory. Previous pieces have pointed out...

New Signings: Eamonn Brophy and Collin Quaner  Let's start with Eamonn Brophy given we've seen him play for Hamilton and Kilmarnock (and Scotland once!) previously. Jim Goodwin has stated " He loves to get his shot off, which I really encourage from all my players... Other than just scoring goals I love his all-round attitude. He’s my type of player. He works hard for the team and he doesn’t give centre-halves a second on the ball" (Source: James Cairney in The Herald ). There's no doubt Eamonn Brophy is a Jim Goodwin player. As mentioned in my last blog,   we actually rank fifth in the league for shots per 90 minutes at 10.06, and fourth for shots outside the box (94). Brophy this season is third in the league for shots per 90 minutes with 3.66, lagging behind Edouard (4.05) and Christie (3.85). We have several players in the top 30 (MacPherson, the departed Morias, Durmus, Erwin) but, more interestingly, the only other Kilmarnock player to feature this season i...

  How do St Mirren compare to the rest of the SPFL Premiership? Warning : This article is statistics heavy .  Expected Goals definition -  Expected Goals (xG) works by "taking all shots by a team in the course of the game and looking at the probabilities [of a goal being scored]" (Biermann, 2019: 33). If you remember the beauty Ethan Erhahon scored at Pittodrie, a goal of the season contender, it has an xG of 0.02 -  meaning that for every 100 shots, the model would expect a goal to be scored twice. A penalty has an xG of 0.76. The model is smart enough to distinguish between shots and headers, different body angles, and the proximity of defenders and the goalkeeper. Not to say xG is flawless, certainly not, but the limitations and benefits of it are best reserved for another article. NB:  Most other clubs are ahead of us in the games played column (3 in the case of Rangers, Hibs, Dundee United, St Johnstone, and Ross County). I will do my best to point this out...

  What to look out for from St Mirren in 2021 St Mirren have ended 2020 in 7th place in the Scottish Premiership, with 21 points from 18 games played. The threat of having matches against Hamilton and Motherwell forfeited as 3-0 defeats still looms large, however the optimism that the arrival of a new year naturally brings is justified from a Saints perspective, even if these potential losses threaten to besmirch our record and make the standings look less rosy for us. Jim Goodwin has had time to rectify what was going wrong during a garish run of six consecutive league defeats, starting with the 1-0 loss away to St Johnstone in August and stretching through to November, when a 0-0 home draw with Dundee United stopped the rot. There were several mitigating circumstances during this time - Covid cancellations meaning we played just one league game in October, Jak Alnwick's absence for three matches, a relatively unkind fixture list - but ultimately the situation on the pitch was unh...