The international break. The perfect time to sit back, take stock of where things are and spend a weekend extracting opinions about friendly matches out of yourself like field surgery.
It’s nearly time for a return of the good stuff, though. The St Mirren stuff. Aberdeen are the visitors on Saturday, managed by a certain Stephen Robinson, making his first return to the SMiSA since his departure last month. The diary has been marked ever since.
Craig McLeish is staying at St Mirren. Interim manager until the end of the season, alongside former Saint Stuart Taylor as his assistant. So far, McLeish has had two games in charge: one loss that felt like more than that and one win that felt like a statement. He is 36, was running the academy three weeks ago and has now been handed a relegation fight and a Scottish Cup semi-final against Celtic. Saturday – as a starting point for what’s to come – will be huge.
There’ll be a lot of hand wringing around Robinson’s return. Respect levels and who owes who what amount of what. It’ll probably get quite silly. The personnel swapping between these clubs, both past and present, has already injected a fair deal into this game.
Robinson is far from the only one to have made the switch from one side of this fixture to the other. His assistant Brian Kerr. Toyosi Olusanya. Elvis Bwomono. Jayden Richardson. Killian Phillips. Jamie Langfield. Nearly Tony Docherty before he realised there wasn’t nearly enough room on this merrygoround for him and all his Derek McInnes anecdotes and sent us his old Dundee assistant instead.
Scottish football is a small place. Everyone has worked for everyone, played against everyone, managed everyone. Robinson will get a reception on Saturday. Good or bad, he’ll get a reception. The circumstances of his departure generated the kind of residual feeling that tends to express itself loudly in enclosed spaces.
Aberdeen sit three points above us. Win on Saturday and we drag them right into the mess with us, which would be enormously satisfying in ways that go slightly beyond the purely footballing. McLeish versus his predecessor. A relegation six-pointer dressed up as a homecoming.
Scottish football, as a product, remains an absolute laugh.
Andrew Christie can be found at Misery Hunters
