It Must Be Love Street

 St Mirren 0 St Johnstone 0 - When Saints Become Sinners Surprisingly, none of the encounters between these sides last season finished level; in truth, nobody was shocked to see this end up as a stalemate. Both teams were in dire need of a victory to galvanise their campaigns and, despite failure to achieve that, neither should feel too disheartened. As the focus of this webpage is always St Mirren, we'll rummage through a few talking points from our perspective. The first problem for the Buddies  was the painful inability to retain possession; we averaged 41.2% on Sunday. This is quite a marked difference from last season, when we actually had the majority of the ball in 3 out of 4 encounters. The Scottish Cup semi final (44.8%) was the sole game where we fell short of this; our home match last campaign was skewed by Jason Kerr's red card - so we managed over 65% possession - and even at McDiarmid Park we mustered 53.5% and 56.4% respectively. Now, as I'm sure many of you

 Celtic 6 St Mirren 0 - A Disappointing Day Dissecting a match in which we were comprehensively outplayed and committed numerous foolish errors does sound like a form of masochism, so please forgive the brevity of this article. Rather than plod through the full game as per usual, I've decided to take inspiration from playing chess on Saturday afternoon against Ross, of @BhoysAnalytics fame (he has over 11K Twitter followers and is one of the best accounts for anyone interested in Celtic, scouting, or Scottish football more broadly).  Ross might have had the satisfaction of watching his real life team triumph 6-0, and had his fantasy football team trounce mine, but - to prevent his hattrick of victories - I won our chess encounter, despite blundering with my queen. Neither of us understand chess beyond the basic rules, however my mind couldn't help returning to a Rene Maric (Borussia Dortmund assistant coach) piece, which you can read here . The diagram below shows a conceptual

St Mirren 1 Hearts 2: Early Struggles Leaves Uphill Battle The opposition was the same; the outcome, sadly, was not. Jon Obika's winner against Hearts way back in March 2020 feels as if it was an eternity ago, yet it was the most recent trip most of the lucky 1039 supporters - myself included - had made to the SMiSA stadium for a league game. Those watching at home can rest assured they didn't miss a classic: but why ? What made this match cagey? Why was our performance so insipid? And why did we lose? The formation we started with was very predictable, although changes were made from the lineup on the opening day: dropping Henderson for Tait was a sensible move most fans would have made; Kiltie replacing Erhahon was more of a surprise. A strange quirk of attending the game this weekend was being able to switch from the usual West Stand seat to instead being in the North Stand - which usually houses away supporters. Here's an approximation of the vantage point you would hav

  Dundee 2 St Mirren 2: Encouraging, Entertaining Game But 2 Points Dropped A volatile and scrappy match, which was genuinely thrilling at times, certainly yielded plenty of talking points. The abject refereeing performance has garnered a lot of attention but to focus solely on Craig Napier and colleagues - as important as their decisions were - would be to ignore numerous positives and negatives St Mirren fans could take from the 90 minutes. The number of positives and negatives you took from the game naturally depends upon your own perspective. Additionally, how the season progresses for both clubs might dictate, upon reflection, whether or not this truly was a 'points dropped' draw for us. St Mirren Starting Lineup The concern many Saints supporters, including myself, had about a possible lack of goals was made to look laughable 4 minutes in. The new signings Curtis Main and Eamonn Brophy wasted no time in proving they have found some chemistry; they combined expertly for th