Simo Valakari chose the word “catastrophic” to sum up what had happened to his St Johnstone team against Dundee.
There were plenty of other adjectives that would have done the job just as effectively.
A lamentable start to the Tayside derby, leaving Saints 3-0 down at the midway point of the first half, proved to be irretrievable, even though the performance level improved significantly from the half-hour mark.
The Perth side are now eight points adrift at the bottom of the Premiership table.
Bridging that gap over the remainder of the season will be as mountainous a challenge as it sounds.
Courier Sport assesses what went wrong on Sunday and what comes next.
Goalkeeper
With his budget spent on other positions, Craig Levein took a reckless gamble in deciding that two 23-year-old goalkeepers, neither with a body of work in top-flight football to their name, would cope with the demands of a Premiership campaign.
Levein made other mistakes in the summer transfer market but that was by far and away the most significant.
It wasn’t fair on Josh Rae or Ross Sinclair, who weren’t ready, and it has been the foundation of a wretched 2024/25 season thus far.
It also speaks to an off-field McDiarmid Park structure that wasn’t fit for purpose and still isn’t.
Where were the checks and balances?
St Johnstone needed a director of football then and, half-a-year later, they still need one now.
That these young goalies, both with promise and pedigree, had to coach themselves for around a month was further evidence of a club operating unprofessionally.
Simo Valakari was the next head coach to take a calculated risk, albeit in a far more difficult recruitment environment.
He chose to wait until January before bringing in a senior goalkeeper. That was an error.
Free agent, experienced goalies might not be in plentiful supply between transfer windows, but they can be found, as Ross County have shown.
The fresh twist, and the one most relevant to Sunday’s game, is that St Johnstone didn’t have a goalkeeper lined up to sign the minute the bells chimed for the turn of the year.
Only those inside the club will know if that’s a failure to identify suitable targets, a failure to offer enough money to get the right man, a misguided notion that time was on their side, a combination of the above or something else entirely.
But it was a must.
They had months to make sure they addressed this situation before the Dundee match and didn’t.
Josh Rae wasn’t more responsible for the ruinous start to a local derby than many of his outfield team-mates, or indeed for the plight Saints now find themselves in.
There is mitigation for him dropping the ball in the penalty box seconds into the contest – he should have been a back-up keeper this season, whose career progression was aided by a handful of first team starts and getting acclimatised to a Premiership environment.
There is no mitigation for St Johnstone dropping the ball in the summer and STILL not having picked it up.
From strength to weakness
Valakari has made mistakes over this recent spell of five defeats in six games which has seen Saints plummet to the foot of the table and now looks likely to define a relegation season.
He should have made substitutions at 2-1 up against St Mirren; he got his formation wrong at Tynecastle; and his midfield looked ill-equipped for the Dundee game, which turned out to be the case.
But, even if he had produced a managerial masterclass over the festive period, he would have struggled to keep this ship afloat.
If somebody can tell me a formation and starting line-up that would have been significantly more effective on Sunday, I would love to learn what it is. Valakari probably would too.
The crux of Saints’ collapse has been that the Finn got a bit of a bounce out of recognising the best part of this squad was the technically sound ball players he could call upon in midfield.
Combined with Sven Sprangler (almost certainly going to be the player of the season, who wasn’t even getting picked by Valakari’s predecessor), those midfielders popped the ball about crisply and effectively for a couple of months.
It gave the team an identity and gave opposition managers something new to think about, while earning Saints a few results in the process.
With the exception of Fran Franczak against Hibs, the performance level of those same players has fallen off a cliff.
Matt Smith was hooked before half-an-hour was on the clock on Thursday; Jason Holt hadn’t been playing well before his red card on Thursday; Graham Carey has been in and out of the team and hasn’t had one of his magic moments for a long time; and Nicky Clark is being starved of the ball as the link between midfield and attack at the tip of a diamond.
Thank goodness for Sprangler but he gets swamped and has to do the job of two men all too frequently these days.
Arguably the only area of strength bequeathed to Valakari has become a weakness.
He doesn’t have wingers (or reliable full-backs) so can’t try to play the game out wide; he doesn’t have a target man who can hold the ball up for long enough; his two pacy strikers make bad decisions and generally look lost; and he doesn’t have central defenders who would provide a solid back-three platform which would make better use of Andre Raymond and Drey Wright as wing-backs.
So, yes, the situation wouldn’t have been quite as bleak had Valakari been 10 out of 10 with his team selections and tactics every match-day.
But this is a crisis born of an unbalanced squad, with no depth and no capability of winning games in different ways.
What next?
There will be plenty of players who might have considered signing for St Johnstone this month had the team been two or three points off 11th rather than eight and now won’t take a phone call.
Footballers who have plenty of options, basically.
You would imagine you could put Calvin Ramsay in that category.
Recruitment has become much harder, that’s a fact.
But the idea that it is pointless to pursue reinforcements because the club’s fate is already sealed is a nonsense.
It’s a grim predicament but there have been more far-fetched footballing stories than Saints clawing back a few points before the split and then a few points after it, as unlikely as that feels just now.
The commitment to overhaul the squad can’t be diluted.
However, the focus should shift.
Bar a couple of loans (goalkeeper possibly one of them) the priority should now be more on the long-term rather than the short.
Most of the signings should be cut from the Bozo Mikulic and Sprangler cloth – players who will enhance the team in the here and now and be the type of character you would want (and realistically be able to keep) for a Championship campaign next season.
It would be as unacceptable to wave the white flag off the pitch as it would be on it.
But the rebuild for the likelihood of second tier football, and all that entails, starts now.
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