I thought that game today was about as boring as it was possible to get. We lacked tempo and urgency, as has been the case so often this season. But today is an exception in that I’m not going to get all antsy about that, because today I hold the opposition wholly accountable for that. Our players took an afternoon off. They were allowed to because the opposition put us under almost no pressure at all. They went for damage limitation.
And a team who does that gets what it deserves from a game; nothing whatsoever.
Honestly, I’ve watched some teams strangle games against us this season but always there was a spark of intent about them. Many of those teams who’ve snatched draws – and Kilmarnock when they beat us – put a lot of men behind the ball. But on most occasions they had a good excuse; they weren’t trailing by a single goal at home.
Hamilton today offered the sum total of nil.
As we proved at Ibrox, teams with ten men can still make attacking decisions. We could have sat in deep and defended for that one, but we went for the jugular and got our rewards. I do not know what reward Hamilton played for today; they were appalling.
And that gave our own players full license to pass the ball backwards and from side to side and to venture up the park only sporadically. What else were we supposed to do? Go Hell for leather with a cup semi final next weekend? It would have been more entertaining to watch, but I would prefer that our team took it easy like that than risk anything.
There was no risk whatsoever today, from the moment Leigh scored within sixty seconds of coming on for the second half. That killed the game, because their ambition for the match was never even to leave their own penalty area.
Which brings me, briefly, to the red card; whatever the whingeing on Sevco social media might say, whatever the commentary team thought, the guy was lucky to avoid a booking for his first lunge on Kieran. To then throw our left back to the ground less than half a minute after he got his deserved yellow was neddish stupidity of the purest sort.
He deserved to see red. The complaining and bitching that I fully expect is simply people making excuses and the player himself shouldn’t be the beneficiary of excuses.
We are one win away from seven in a row.
Now, I dare the SPFL to give Scottish football a lift and put on the game everyone (except the Sevco fans) want to see.
Anything else is a gross dereliction of their duty to market the sport as a spectacle. If they don’t do it frankly they have no excuse. It will be just another thing for those – including Peter Lawwell – who think Doncaster is doing a good to answer for.
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