Now that he has got the taste for scoring goals, Ali McCann is hungry for more.
The young midfielder chose the perfect time to break his St Johnstone duck, grabbing a late winner in a crucial six-pointer against Hamilton Accies on Boxing Day.
There are already several impressive strings to the McCann bow and he wants to make finding the back of the net on a regular basis another one.
“I was delighted to get my first goal,” said the 20-year-old.
“Cal (Callum Hendry) put it on a plate for me to be fair.
“I made the run into the box and it was just about making sure I got decent contact on it. Thankfully I did.
“It was great to score it in front of our fans and even better that we held on for the win.
“The manager has been nagging at me for a while about that side of my game.
“Hopefully now that I’ve got one I’ll go on to get a few more.”
This time last year McCann hadn’t even started his loan spell with Stranraer. His rise to prominence in 2019 has arguably been the best individual career story at McDiarmid Park in a calendar year that has just one game left in it.
“I’ve not really stopped to think about it,” he reflected. “I just keep looking at it game by game.
“It’s been a really good year for me on loan at Stranraer and then back here for the first half of this season.
“I’ve loved every minute of it.
“I don’t look on myself as being established in the team, though.
“The manager picks a new team for every game and if I’m in it I try to take my opportunity.”
Saints are now preparing to sign off the year with a game against Ross County tomorrow. Win it and new top-six horizons will be opening up in 2020.
“It’s been well documented that our start to the season wasn’t great but we’ve made ourselves solid at the back and that’s four clean sheets in a row,” said McCann.
“The manager has always been positive even when results haven’t been going our way.
“He was confident that we would eventually start getting the clean sheets and results.
“We’re on an unbeaten run of four games. If we get another win on Sunday we can start looking up rather than down.
“We can’t take our foot off the gas. You can see how quickly we’ve moved off the bottom by a few points so other teams could do the same.”
He added: “We drew against Ross County earlier in the season but we should have won that game.
“We knew that we’d matched them and maybe even got the better of them.
“If we keep this good form going we can definitely win it.”
Meanwhile, manager Tommy Wright will have a full squad to choose from tomorrow and rotating his team again will be under consideration.
“We looked at the three games in a week,” he said. “At this time of year if everyone is fit it is important you maximise your squad.
“People will be disappointed they were left out but it is important they react in the right way.
“We have a full squad to pick from. It can be a real positive being able to freshen things up.
“We have to build on a comfortable victory. It was probably one of the easiest games have had at Hamilton in terms of control.
“It wasn’t a great game and there weren’t a lot of chances. But Hamilton didn’t lay a glove on us and it was one of Zander’s easier games in reaching 100 top flight matches.
“This is a huge opportunity for us to build on recent results.
“It’s down to the players. They have shown tremendous character during what has been a difficult time for us.
“We were bottom of the league going into the Hearts game at the end of October.
“We have now put ourselves in a position where we can get up into eighth place.
“If we can break through the 20 points barrier we don’t need many more to get ourselves to safety.
“But we aren’t sitting here gloating about it.
“We know there is a lot of hard work still to do and we want to finish off 2019 with a positive result.
“Ross County have firepower we have to guard against. But I see this as an opportunity to move ahead of them. The players should also be looking at it that way.
“The game up there was probably the best we have played in terms of football.
“This is going to be a massive game for both clubs.”
