St Johnstone are perennial slow starters.
It’s like Rangers and Celtic getting bucket-loads of penalties and conceding next to none and Kilmarnock and Livingston winning far more games on their plastic pitches than on grass.
It’s like Hibs and Aberdeen trying to sign the same players, it’s one of the Premiership’s pillars.
Or is it?
With Saints’ winless start to the season having now reached five games, Courier Sport looked at the previous 14 campaigns in the top flight since Derek McInnes brought the Perth club out of the second-tier wilderness.
We’ll find out where the current team stand in the slow-start pecking order and whether the general perception is McDiarmid myth or reality.
- By the five-match point MacLean’s side are now at, 10 of the Saints teams had already posted their first victory.
- The FIRST day of the season is actually the most common of the 14 seasons for getting that stress-relieving win.
- Saints have started with a bang on three occasions – 2013/14, 2014/15 and 2017/18. They were all under Tommy Wright.
- If Saints don’t beat Hibs on Saturday they’ll be in the top three for longest opening runs without a win.
- They will still have plenty of time to make sure they don’t break an unwanted record, though. Wright’s class of 19/20 didn’t win a game until their 10th fixture – an October 26, a 3-2 triumph over Hamilton Accies.
- The average time it has taken Saints to get win number one is 3.85 games.
- The team Saints have most often got off the mark against is Motherwell.
- The good news is that the Perth side are yet to face the Steelmen. The bad news is, it’s four fixtures down the track.
- Since the reorganisation of the leagues in the 1970s, no team has got close to the record low of Sandy Clark’s 2001/02 relegation side. It took until November and an eye-watering 14 games before Saints won a match (at Kilmarnock) in that miserable campaign.
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