Tommy Wright didn’t feel comfortable when the word “swagger” was used to describe St Johnstone at the weekend, but he is happy to admit his team are in their best form of the season.
And he believes their purple patch could not have come at a better time. The Perth men have won five out of their last six games, and drawn the other.
As well as clinching a place in their first ever Scottish Cup final, they have also just secured a morale-boosting victory over their May 17 opponents, Dundee United.
There have been stand-out results earlier in the campaign, such as the heavy defeats of Ross County and Inverness Caledonian Thistle, but according to Saints boss Wright the recent run has been their best spell of the season.
He pointed out: “Results would back up that this is our best form of the season.
“If you look at the last few games, we’ve only really had a poor day against Partick. And even then we only dropped a couple of points to a scruffy last minute goal that Alan (Mannus) would have saved on another day.
“This is a great time to be on a good run. There’s confidence in the squad.
“Somebody said there was a swagger about our performance. We don’t do ‘swagger’ here. We just want to go out and win football matches.”
Wright will leave it to other managers to speak about their football “philosophies” but he believes his own team’s style of play is under-rated.
The Northern Irishman explained: “There’s a lot of talk about philosophies and managers saying how they play.
“We just want to find a way to win football matches. That’s the most important thing.
“Along the way we play some decent stuff which we don’t get the credit for because we’re deemed unfashionable and hard to beat. Well I think hard to beat is a good quality.
“We’ve scored nearly two goals a game at home and won 15 games, which is more than we’ve ever won in the top league. And there’s still four to go.
“It speaks for itself. We don’t need to preach about how we play. We just get on with the job.
“Teams get labels and a lot of it is hyped up by managers going on and on about how they play. Then people build a thing up about ‘that’s how they play’. If people say it often enough then folk end up believing them.
“The quality of our football is often overlooked. Stevie May’s goal at the weekend looked an untidy finish in the end because their player gets a foot to it, but the build-up was excellent.
“We’re a lot more than dogged and hard to beat. We can mix it when we have to and play when we have to.
“A winning mentality is the best philosophy we can have. I spoke to Alec Cleland about it and he said Walter Smith once told him that there’s only one formula in football that matters and that’s having a winning one.
“We’re happy with the way we’re playing. We’re happy we’ve had a tremendous season and we’re happy with the form we’re going into the last five games of the season with. But we’ll not get carried away.”