The status quo was preserved at the bottom of the Premiership on Saturday.
Dundee squandered a two-goal lead to lose a thrilling game to Rangers at Dens Park, Kilmarnock were unexpectedly thrashed in Paisley and St Johnstone were comprehensively beaten by high-flying Hibs in Edinburgh.
For different reasons, none of the three clubs will be full of the joys of spring.
From a Perth perspective, you can understand Simo Valakari choosing “calm” as a post-match keyword.
With Saints’ survival prospects unchanged, albeit they have a game less to get the job done, this isn’t the time for one bad performance to become a three or four-game slump.
There was no getting away from the fact that it was dismal display at Easter Road, however.
Courier Sport picks out three talking points.
All wrong
You could pinpoint 10 different components of this ineffective attempt to get a vital point or points in the capital city and still leave room for plenty more.
Naming every starter, bar maybe Jason Holt, and analysing their individual contributions would get you there straight away.
Throw into the mix a couple of half-time subs who failed to make an impact as well.
Strategy, which comes from the head coach, and an inability, to adapt it when it wasn’t working, which comes from the players, are further key factors.
A very good opponent certainly shouldn’t be ignored either.
Hibs are a vastly improved side when it comes to where and when they press.
That stopped Saints from building any attacking rhythm.
So too did the operation of their defensive line to catch attackers offside. It’s an underrated quality in the Hibs team.
The reason this is one big talking point rather than several is that all the Saints shortcomings were interlinked, feeding into a performance that would have been a fortnight in the making but looked nothing of the sort.
Other than the fact that Jonathan Svedberg hadn’t showed anything in competitive action to warrant a recall, I could understand the logic of the team Valakari picked and the tactics that underpinned it.
Sacrificing one striker, Adama Sidibeh, for an attacking midfielder who would give Saints a chance of passing their way through Hibs and making sure Makenzie Kirk didn’t get isolated was a gameplan with merit.
If the players behind him had tackled, passed and moved more productively, Kirk would have had a better chance to get into the game.
If Kirk had been smarter with the runs he made to find space, the players behind him would have had a better chance to get him into the game.
Both can be (and were) true.
Essentially, Saints lost because they couldn’t manufacture a reliable out-ball and several team issues were wrapped up in that – the team line-up; the decision-making and execution at the back and in the middle; and the ease with which the Hibs defenders were able to go about their duties.
If a passing side can’t build phases of play, the conclusion is as inevitable as Saturday’s.
Individual mistakes have defined most of the defeats this season, particularly the harrowing ones, and there were clearly individual errors at play in the goals conceded this time around.
There were about five in the Hibs opener alone.
But, whether you think it’s harder or easier to take because of it, this loss was arguably the most stark collective malfunction in Valakari’s time in charge.
The next team selection
Several players had their worst performance as a St Johnstone player.
Zach Mitchell and Sam Curtis can be excused, given their overall reliability, quality (and youth).
Mitchell will be better for the lessons absorbed at Easter Road and will rightly keep his place for the Celtic game.
You would imagine so will Curtis, who was substituted at half-time against Hibs.
Valakari has more questions than obvious answers in other areas, however.
Svedberg is a concern and we might just have to accept that he won’t be the midfielder Saints need until next season.
A period of adaptation was, and still is, to be expected given his break from competitive football and the stylistic difference between the Swedish and Scottish top flights.
But that’s six starts he’s had now, and the wait for a “this is what I’m about” display goes on.
Victor Griffith’s injury lay-off has to be taken into account when assessing his performance.
The Panama international could neither pick up the pace of the game nor get to grips with the half-attacker, half-midfielder role he’d been given by his head coach.
Will Valakari keep one, both or neither in his team on Sunday?
Saints are about to play the best offensive side in the country by some distance, so it’s hard to imagine he’ll drop his only out and out central defensive midfielder.
But Sven Sprangler’s form is becoming worryingly inconsistent.
The biggest issue in terms of who to pick and how to make it work, however, is up front.
From the moment the January transfer window shut with Saints short of a natural hold-up number nine, I suspected that would be the gap in Valakari’s squad which had the potential to undermine all the issues that had been addressed.
Many factors bleed into their atrocious record against the top six clubs and most of them were exposed on Saturday.
There isn’t a striker on the books who can be relied upon to allow the team to operate in the opposition half for long enough.
Kirk, Sidibeh, Benji Kimpioka and Nicky Clark would all be better players with a powerhouse ball magnet to bounce off.
The reality is Valakari will likely have to pick two from that four but there isn’t a natural partnership among them and a midfielder will have to be sacrificed, with the knock-on problems that will create.
Benefit of the doubt
This wasn’t the first time in recent seasons St Johnstone have lost a game at Easter Road in a fashion that has troubled a fan base.
Saints barely laid a glove on Hibs in September 2023 and three games later Steven MacLean was sacked.
Craig Levein didn’t get any more matches in charge after his team’s meek display in Leith 12 months later.
Saturday’s result felt as certain as those other two from the moment the hosts took the lead.
There were tactical and circumstantial differences to the three matches, of course.
But there was a common thread – a lack of substance to any fightback.
The current team needs to make sure the supporters, who had a wave of Leith déjà vu washing over them from about 20 past three on Saturday afternoon, aren’t served up anything as abject as this again in what remains of the season.
It is highly unlikely they will beat Celtic or draw against them next weekend.
Saints can, however, reassert their identity, shape, aggression and capability of putting together coherent passages of play.
Doing so will leave them in a better place for a pre-split trip to Tannadice that will be “must win”.
It might sound strange when a side is five points adrift and has been bottom of the table for months, but they do deserve the benefit of the doubt.
This is the second St Johnstone team of the season.
And since mid-January, it had only played poorly once (at Kilmarnock). Saturday made it twice.
In 11 games, it has won far more often than it has lost.
That’s long enough to be labelled as “decent form” by any yardstick.
There’s a reasonable argument to say what the supporters witnessed against Hibs, as insipid and dispiriting as it was, can be described as the exception rather than the rule.
Saints have to reinforce that theory, otherwise the 3-0 defeat to Hibs will be talked about in the season post-mortem as the beginning of the end.
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