3 St Johnstone talking points: Too many Perth players have accepted their fate

With only three games left of the season and another defeat to their name, St Johnstone’s relegation to the Championship hasn’t yet been sealed.

But you won’t find many, if any, Perth supporters who left McDiarmid Park after watching their side lose 2-0 to Kilmarnock talking up the prospect of a final fortnight great escape.

Second bottom Ross County falling to their sixth defeat in a row may have left them a “lifeline”, as Simo Valakari put it, but the Highlanders’ collapse also serves to make Saints’ own failure to capitalise all the more frustrating.

A six-point gap is unbridgeable, even with County up next, when you’re failing to sort your own performance levels out.

Courier Sport picks out three talking points from Saturday’s match.

Inexplicable

It’s a grim state of affairs when you’re comparing the three goals conceded against Motherwell to the two Kilmarnock strikes and arriving at the conclusion last weekend’s were more palatable.

Tony Watt ruthlessly exposed defenders playing out of position and out of form.

The David Watson opener for Killie and the incident that led to the VAR penalty were far more infuriating.

For a centre-back, Daniels Balodis, to not put his laces through the ball when it came to him on the goal-line was inexplicable.

As soon as that doesn’t happen, anybody who has watched St Johnstone week after week this season would have got that familiar sinking feeling of an imminent goal.

I certainly did.

This should have been coached out of a centre-half before he reached the age of 10 and certainly won’t have been coached into him at McDiarmid.

Then, when it came to pressing once Kilmarnock were in possession in and around Saints’ penalty box, two home players showed the required technique, body positioning and intensity. Two didn’t.

Talking of required technique, body positioning and intensity, Victor Griffith lacked all three when he stuck out a lazy leg as Rory McKenzie took him on early in the second half.

The long delay for the ball to go out of play and the referee to be sent to check his pitch-side monitor naturally produces a feeling of being aggrieved, but this was the type of challenge in the 18-yard area that VAR officials will be all over 10 times out of 10.

Valakari’s back-four, with a wide forward at left-back, a left-back at centre-half and a central midfielder turned centre-half at right-back, was actually pretty solid as a unit for most of this game – far more so than the backline at Motherwell.

I can’t recall a game against Kilmarnock in recent memory when Saints were as comfortable dealing with balls into the box from dead balls and open play as this, which suggest training ground work paying off.

But it doesn’t count for anything if you commit the sort of penalty box schoolboy errors that led to the two goals.

Ikpeazu goes the distance

That Uche Ikpeazu was able to complete a full match would have surprised everybody in the ground.

There was no risk to his knee in keeping the powerhouse on the pitch and no sign of him running on fumes by the end of the contest.

It’s a credit to the man himself and Saints’ new physio, Caitlin Wright.

Ikpeazu can hold his head up high.

Makenzie Kirk should have scored from a low cut-back he sent into a dangerous area from the left, and then the roles were reversed later in the first half when the 30-year-old couldn’t direct a close-range volley past Killie goalkeeper, Kieran O’Hara.

There was a back post miss shortly after the break and a header he should have buried on 50 minutes – thank goodness he didn’t because it would have been disallowed as this was during the spell between Griffith’s challenge on McKenzie and referee, Iain Snedden, letting play continue.

Ikpeazu was still winning headers in injury-time, long after some team-mates had resigned themselves to defeat.

He has never, or very rarely, been a prolific finisher so it’s likelier that the opportunities the former Hearts man passed up were just part of the package rather than a consequence of rustiness.

But if Saints are going to score goals in the last three games, it’s a good bet Ikpeazu will be involved in them.

Not like this

There are so many imponderables in football, particularly when a team is hurtling towards relegation like this St Johnstone one.

Accusing players of not showing enough fight is a grey area at the best of times.

You have to factor in the mental aspect of playing the game, which can often inhibit an athlete and make it appear to those of us in the stand that he isn’t putting in as much effort as this situation, any situation, demands.

But what can be said with confidence is that it’s never a good look when, for the second game in a row, two young fringe players show a greater willingness to take the ball than far more experienced peers, a capacity to choose the right option, they don’t try to blame somebody else and, in general, are a better team-mate.

Taylor Steven and Josh McPake shouldn’t be outshining others as markedly as they are.

And that’s without either being above a seven or eight out of 10.

This isn’t a team which has “chucked it” to dig out the infamous words of Steven MacLean after what turned out to be his last game in charge.

But there are a few senior pros who are getting very close to hiding.

The lack of leadership on the pitch and, I dare say, in the dressing room has never been as stark in the post-January section of the season as it is now.

Valakari must be struggling to accept that his relentless positivity and commitment to raising standards on the training ground isn’t producing a going down with a fight finale from players who beat champions Celtic just a month ago.

St Johnstone needed urgency, desperation and controlled aggression that flirted with uncontrolled at the start of the post-split phase of the campaign.

Quantifying what that looks like isn’t easy.

But it certainly doesn’t look like this.

Too many are giving off the air of believing their fate has been sealed.

They should be raging against the dying of the light.