[El Car]

A bad bang on the noggin for big Simo in the line of duty. He deserves some credit tonight. On the whole though, aside from a couple of bits of slackness in letting their men get away the defence restricted St. Johnstone to hopeful long shots. We were in control for the first quarter of the match and pretty much the whole second half, and the only problem was creating that final opening. Aird's crossing is still woeful, but I'll lay off as it was his ball in that we scored from, and we're clearly not doing nearly enough set piece work in training because corners and free kicks were pretty rubbish again. Our link up play was much better in the 2nd half though, and that meant we didn't have to rely on set pieces for chances.

Like ICT, St. Johnstone showed they could play a lot better than anyone we've met in the Championship, but they still wanted to sit back and pack their defence and hit us on the break, and we need to deal with that a bit better. We haven't dropped points to an opponent that actually looked any good this season, but the fact we have dropped those points shows teams don't need to be good, they just need to target our obvious weak points. We're hopefully sorting them out gradually, and this will be a confidence booster - which is good as long as it doesn't lead to overconfidence and sloppiness.

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One other thing we obviously need to work on: shielding the ball in the corner. We tried that between Miller and Macleod and on each of the 3 times I counted we managed to lose the ball to the opponent without even getting it out of play.