It Must Be Love Street

 Thoughts On The Week On Monday evening, I was in attendance at the SMiSA meet the manager event held on Zoom. Jim Goodwin and Tony Fitzpatrick were on top form and did a fantastic job of answering the questions put to them (no need to take my word for it, the SMiSA social media accounts have uploaded the footage). What elevated the night from entertaining to fascinating, in my mind anyway, was at the end when Jim decided to show the Powerpoint he had prepared for his interview to become Buddies boss back in the summer of 2019. There were numerous themes which kept cropping up when the vision for the club and, by extension, Jim's foundational principles of football management were discussed. A key one, to get an early talking point for this blog going, was the emphasis on running . Players who didn't have the required enthusiasm, work ethic, athleticism, and pace, to suit this new St Mirren side would simply not be signed in the first place. Less than 20 months isn't enough...

 How Much Will St Mirren Miss Jamie McGrath? The Liverpool legend Bill Shankly once said to an injured Tommy Smith, one of his most important players, "What do you mean your knee? It's Liverpool Football Club's knee." The story might be apocryphal, however, watching Jamie McGrath be substituted after a quarter of an hour against Celtic midweek with a dislocated shoulder, Jim Goodwin could have been forgiven for thinking "That's not just your  shoulder, that's St Mirren's shoulder." If the St Mirren player of the year awards were being dished out today, my podium for player of the season would consist of Jak Alnwick, Jake Doyle-Hayes, and Jamie McGrath. Any of them would be valid recipients of top spot, in my opinion, but when assessing the trio - and the squad overall - it's hard to reach any other assessment than Jamie McGrath being our most important player. After all, Dean Lyness deputised ably for Jak Alnwick against Hibs and Kilmarnock r...

A Love Letter To Team Goals I don't know if Jak Alnwick plays golf but, at a shade after quarter past 3, he got out the pitching wedge at Parkhead. Stationed 40 yards away on the right touchline was Marcus Fraser, who was deliberately avoiding the cover of Odsonne Edouard. The chip wasn't quite perfect which, in its own way, was absolutely perfect for St Mirren. Fraser ups his pace from a casual walk to a near sprint, acutely aware that Callum McGregor is being dragged further up the pitch, as if being gradually sucked into the ball's orbit. He decides that the floor is lava, volleying a pass inside. Surely, one of St Mirren's four central midfielders will be available? Cammy MacPherson is freed from the shackles of McGregor; yet he needs to show even more urgency than Fraser did. Ismaila Soro is rapidly descending. There's no time to think. Act only on instinct. The ball goes where it should - forward. Green and white jerseys are not structured at all; there's...

  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...