TREVOR CARSON was the hero for St Mirren as the goalkeeper denied Dundee three times in a penalty shoot-out to ensure his side remain in the hat for this afternoon’s Scottish Cup fifth-round draw.
Both teams struggled to truly lay a glove on each other on a chilly afternoon in Paisley and after 120 goalless minutes had passed, the tie went to penalties where the hosts ultimately triumphed.
Carson lapped up the adulation from the home fans but Buddies manager Stephen Robinson insisted that another behind-the-scenes figure deserves his share of the credit too.
“Ultimately what we got out of that is through to the next round,” he said. “We weren’t at our best obviously – that goes without saying.
“As a team we made poor decisions on the ball and we hold our hands up to that. But in the cup you just need to get through and we’ve got through. Trevor made three excellent penalty saves and deserves a lot of credit. And so does Jamie Langfield, our goalkeeping coach, because he called Trevor over just before the shoot-out and gave him info about every single Dundee player and what way they were going to go with their penalties.
“And he got every one of them right. So big credit to Trevor and to Jamie. The other positives were the four boys who came on. Overall, we know we’re better than that. We played brilliantly in our last three league games and got one point. We didn’t play particularly well today and we’re through to the next round. And I’ll probably take today out of those two.”
Robinson continued: “We have been brilliant the last three games. We were great at Celtic when I looked back, against a top side.
“We were brilliant in both games against Hearts - but we didn’t get a whole lot out of the games. We just didn’t click as a group but we made changes and it helped a bit.
“Sometimes the decision-making isn’t right but we stayed solid and ground it out.
“My preference in the next round is a home tie because that’s us 11 unbeaten here. We didn’t play particularly well but we are through and with that record, we must be doing something right.”
