In seven of their 13 league games St Johnstone have failed to score.
Make that eight if you count a Stephen O’Donnell own goal when Motherwell visited McDiarmid Park.
It’s a statistic that stretches the boundaries of blips and phases.
Apart from maybe Celtic away, which is almost to be expected, Saturday’s 0-0 draw with St Mirren was the first of those seven/eight in which the Perth side didn’t come close to finding the back of the net.
Or even threaten to do so.
The cleanest strike on goal was 10 seconds into the contest when Glenn Middleton was gifted possession pretty much straight from the whistle.
That was as good as it got.
Go back through the seasons and Saints have only ever been a free-scoring side in bursts.
By and large, they rewrote club history on the back of their defensive, not offensive, work.
Efficient and effective
Efficient and effective are words woven into the fabric of their jerseys and no apology should be made for it.
They certainly fit well when Chris Kane and Stevie May are being discussed.
You know what you’re going to get from both.
Matches like the home victory against Dundee, when the pair shared three goals between them, will be the exception rather than the norm.
They’ll score important goals. Already have.
And they can be relied upon to selflessly execute a manager’s game plan.
Both are the only Saints players to have more than one Premiership goal (two each) to their name.
That others aren’t supplementing those numbers is a bigger issue.
In the short-term (up until the next transfer window) you would have to say the likeliest individual to change the narrative and start chipping in with goals would be Michael O’Halloran.
You would expect him to be freed from wing-back duties now Shaun Rooney has returned from injury.
And his early season displays warrant more game-time in a role more familiar to him.
Despite a disappointing personal drop-off between St Mirren fixtures, Middleton rediscovering form, possibly initially as an impact sub, is also a realistic November and December scenario.
Elephant in the room
Eetu Vertainen is, of course, the elephant in the room.
Or, more accurately, the elephant in a tracksuit on the sidelines.
He was the big St Johnstone summer signing, the man Saints paid a transfer fee for, and the man whose work permit saga started before the club entered Europe and was still going when they exited.
He was to provide the X-factor.
For all the talk that this wouldn’t be Guy Melamed all over again, that’s exactly what it has become.
Melamed had actually made a Premiership start by this stage of last season – in the third match for which he was available.
Vertainen has now been available for nine.
And when Melamed got his second chance at Tannadice, which he took, it was game number 11.
The hope is that, as with the Israeli, Davidson gets to the point where he has enough faith in Vertainen to put him in from the beginning (or even give him an extended run off the bench), he seizes his opportunity, and Saints have themselves that different attacking dimension.
The Finnish under-21 international is on a two-year contract and the team’s league position, far from perilous, affords Davidson the opportunity to be patient.
But it won’t be long before plans are being made for the mid-season window.
And, as things stand, what to do with Vertainen will be a high priority.
Unless something changes up front, it is looking increasingly likely that, with or without him still at McDiarmid, a new striker will be the January priority.
