We all like to be right, don’t we? Whether big or small, it’s good to get that dopamine hit and find ourselves safe in the knowledge that we might just actually know what we’re doing amidst the frenetic chaos of everyday life.
I can certainly tell you that this is true of football writers. Not only does being right provide a small amount of validation in a job where it’s notoriously hard to predict what is going to happen from one week to the next — which is a big reason why we love the sport in the first place — but in the social media age it can also bring a kind of smug satisfaction in defiance of those who told you, in no uncertain terms, that you were definitely wrong when you made that prediction.
At the start of this season I got a little bit of that — not too much, just a little — from St Johnstone fans on Twitter for saying that their team were going to finish bottom of the Scottish Premiership in 2025. This would see them outside of the top-flight for the first-time since Derek McInnes led them to promotion way back in 2009.
Almost five months down the road and it doesn’t look like such a bad shout, but do you know what? I don’t want that prediction to come true. I want St Johnstone to make me look like an idiot by surviving for another year.
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Given the precarious position of my own side at this moment in time that may seem a little foolhardy, but if there is a world where Hearts and St Johnstone can both survive this campaign, well that sounds like a world I would like to live in. That’s because, after years and years of largely stuffy, industrious tactics, St Johnstone are now good fun to watch. Putting aside the bonkers last few minutes of their 3-2 defeat to St Mirren on Saturday where, once again, officials and VAR ultimately became the star of the show, they’ve now got a manager who is playing a forward-thinking, attractive brand of football that gets pulses racing.
Ok, so perhaps not all the time. The first half against the Buddies was a dreadful display in which Simo Valakari tried to have four centre-forwards playing in his starting XI, not to mention a right-winger at left-back. That went about as well as you can imagine with Benjamin Kimpioka, Adama Sidibeh and Makenzie Kirk looking like strangers at the top of the pitch, while Nicky Clark (in midfield) and Drey Wright (at left-back) looked lost in unfamiliar terrain. But Valakari stuck to his guns and the momentum of the game swung in his favour after a 1-0 half-time deficit. He inherited a squad with little in the way of creativity, so by using four strikers, each with a respectable eye for goal at this level, he put his trust instead in his team taking chances when they came. After some tweaks at the break where he encouraged Clark and Wright to move into advanced central areas more, which enabled Kinpioka and Kirk to split into the channels and use their pace, they got their reward with two excellently taken goals.
However, it remains to be seen if this approach will lead to the ultimate goal of staying in the league. There was undoubtedly a fair bit of consternation around St Mirren’s winner, aimed at the match official, but it came after Saints were too open at the back as they piled forward for a winner following another goalkeeping calamity in a season that’s already had too many of them.
Following an error like the one committed by Josh Rae, managers will often err on the side of caution and accept a point in the circumstance, but Valakari wasn’t interested in that and I commend him for it. For a league in which too many teams play a safe brand of 3-4-3 with defenders on the wings, it’s refreshing to see a manager going for it when the game is still in the balance; someone who will forego steeliness for attacking talent.
Like most leagues in sport, there is very much a copy-cat nature at play in the Scottish Premiership. Many teams go for the pragmatic approach because it’s been shown to work for some of the so-called ‘smaller’ clubs. St Johnstone were one such example of this. Tommy Wright’s teams were often unfairly critiqued for being boring, but they were hardly ‘sexy Saints’ either. And while Callum Davidson enjoyed some unprecedented success with the cup-double victory, they were very much a tough watch at times, especially at home where they seemed allergic to scoring goals.
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As a result of that 2021 double it certainly seems like many other teams have copied the blueprint. It’s not made the league better to watch, even if this season has been an obvious improvement on last campaign from an entertainment standpoint.
Saints went against the grain as a team fighting relegation. They ripped up the Craig Levein blueprint and chose Valakari, someone completely different. There is an obvious cautionary tale at play as Hearts themselves last dropped out of the league when they jettisoned the former Scotland boss and went with an entirely new approach under Daniel Stendel. But for other teams to follow suit and look to entertain their fans as well as pick up enough points to survive, then it will help if this Valakari experiment — which, you have to believe, has also been influenced by Jimmy Thelin’s work at Aberdeen — is a resounding success.
Even though results haven’t picked up as much as Saints fans would like, there’s still a lot of believe that once they get to the transfer window and he can reshape the team in his own image then things will be all right. If he can recruit successfully then St Johnstone can remain sexy and be safe.
