Craig McLeish has vowed to turn St Mirren into an “exciting, high-energy” team after negotiating a “tricky” period in interim charge to become St Mirren’s manager on a permanent basis.
The 36-year-old was recently handed a three-year deal despite overseeing just four wins in his 12 games at the helm at the end of last season following Stephen Robinson’s departure for Aberdeen.
“The interim period is tricky because you still feel like you’re trying to keep a lot of things in place from the previous regime and then you’re also trying to keep people happy in and around the club, the players, staff,” McLeish said at a press conference on Thursday.
“You can’t just rip everything up and change it all, and I still can’t do that right now. We’ll have a really good pre-season. I’m excited about the recruitment that we’ve been doing.
“I want it to be exciting, to be fun for the players to play and I want it to be enjoyable for the fans. Ultimately it’s about outcomes and us winning games but the best way that I think we can go and win games is changing style and being more exciting, high energy.
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“We’ll be attacking constantly, it doesn’t matter where we go in this country, we’ll be trying to go toe to toe with everyone, to play our game and try and win every game we play. We know that that’s not going to be the outcome in every single game but that has to be the mentality going into every game that we play.”
McLeish believes many of the players already at the club can help the team evolve and ensure they are not in another relegation dogfight next term.
“I don’t think it requires a big overhaul, we’ve got really talented players and really experienced players within the group,” he said. “There will be comings and goings, we’ve already seen that with some of the boys that have moved on but we’ve been doing a lot of work in the background up to this point to line players up for coming in.
“But I think if we are strong in our messages and our communication to the players, even the players that were here last year they’ll still play a big part in what we want to do.”
