The St Johnstone captaincy hasn’t been a burden this season, Jason Kerr insisted.
And the centre-back certainly isn’t searching for excuses for his “up and down” form.
“Being captain hasn’t weighed heavily on me,” said Kerr, who succeeded Joe Shaughnessy as McDiarmid Park skipper in the summer. “It hasn’t affected me.
“It’s obviously a bit different when you’re captain but that’s mainly off the pitch.
“On the pitch it hasn’t changed the way I play or anything like that.
“I have just made more mistakes that I have made before. That’s what it’s been down to.
“I am not making any excuses because I know I have been up and down this season.
“It’s easy to look at being made captain and think that I have been doing everything different.
“But it hasn’t affected me on the field at all. I feel the same as I did before I was made captain.
“It’s just down to making too many mistakes.”
Kerr added: “We are an inexperienced back four and that’s what’s going to happen at times.
“We just have to work hard as a group to make sure we can cut them out as much as possible.
“Against Hearts I felt I was back to my best, but in the Hibs game it was my mistake that let them score.
“That kind of summed up the season so far.
“All you can do is work hard, keep learning and then hopefully things will turn for you.”
The two Edinburgh sides brought out the Jekyll and Hyde of this St Johnstone team recently.
“We were happy to get a clean sheet against Hearts so to then lose a goal so early against Hibs was really frustrating,” Kerr reflected.
“We thought we’d turned the corner a bit in that Hearts game but the goal we lost was a bad one and the performance afterwards wasn’t good enough.
“The international break came at the wrong time because we wanted to get out there playing again to put it right.
“It was individual mistakes again and I was to blame against Kamberi at the start.
“We have been making far too many errors. The gaffer has been over it with us because we need to nip it in the bud.
“If we can stop it then we can go on and have a good season but we need to eradicate it quickly.”
Aberdeen are Saints’ next opponents on Sunday and their main attacking threat needs no underlining.
Kerr said: “We had a good performance against Aberdeen last time up there at Pittodrie.
“I thought we were solid for most of the game up there, but they always pose a threat to you.
“Sam Cosgrove is a good striker. He’s big, strong and has good movement so you have to be on your game to keep him quiet.
“I felt I did well against Ikpeazu at Hearts along with Wallace Duffy. We figured out early what he was going to do and stopped him from doing it.
“Cosgrove is bigger and better in the air than he is, so while it’s a sort of similar test they are different players.
“It’s not just about a physical game with him, he’s smart and his goals record just shows how much he can punish you.”
Kerr is hoping that the script is written for Stevie May to be the Perth hero against his old club.
“It was good for Stevie to get a goal against Hibs and that will do his confidence a world of good,” he said.
“Hopefully this weekend he’ll be able to get another one and scoring in back-to-back games would be great.”
