Painful memories of St Johnstone’s Europa League exit to FC Minsk should be all the motivation the Perth club’s players need to avoid a League Cup shock on Wednesday night.
That’s the view of manager Tommy Wright ahead of their quarter-final against Morton, who stunned Scottish champions Celtic in the last round and will be determined to defy the odds yet again when they host Saints with a semi-final place at stake.
Saints will still go into the tie as firm favourites to reach the last four, but Wright sadly knows from experience that nothing can be left to chance in fixtures like these.
“The best opportunity for us to win anything is cups, so we’re in the quarter-final and we’re two wins away from a final,” he told Courier Sport.
“We’ve got a difficult tie and people probably looked at it thinking: ‘Give us Morton out of the hat’, but I’ve seen what they’ve done at Celtic and I watched them at Hamilton.
“I think they are a very good side and their league position is probably false, even though they were beaten by Raith on Saturday and Cowdenbeath.
“That doesn’t mean one thing come Wednesday because I imagine there will be a good crowd, they’ll be fired up, and we’ve got to guard against that and be ready.”
“The one thing we won’t do is underestimate the size of the task we’ve got because we’ve already had a slap in the face this season with Minsk.
“We are and were a better side than Minsk and personally it will rankle with me for a long time. That will be below the surface for quite a long time.
“It’s one of the most disappointing nights that I’ve ever experienced. The fact that we played well on the night probably made it worse. If you play poorly you could say it’s an off night, but we didn’t have an off night.
“So the motivation is that we’ve a chance to get to a semi-final and be one game away from a final and then who knows what happens?
“But Derek McInnes, Stuart McCall, Pat Fenlon, Gary Locke, Allan Moore they’ll all be thinking the same because you are at that stage of a competition.”
Saints head into the tie on the back of a comfortable 2-0 win over Motherwell, with goals from Stevie May and Nigel Hasselbaink providing just the tonic the Perth side needed.
“It’s just what the doctor ordered,” Wright said.
“After the 4-3 game at St Mirren, to keep a clean sheet was important, but it wasn’t a defensive performance. We played really well and we were on the front foot.
“I think if you look at even the Hibs game and the Dundee United game, we still created chances in those games. Stevie is on fire and I think Nigel is coming into a rich vein of form.
“Nigel played well this season but now in the last few weeks we’re getting an end product he’s getting goals and assists. I loved the goal he got because maybe last season Nigel wouldn’t have been in that position to capitalise on the goalkeeper’s mistake. He might have switched off.
“So I’m really pleased with the overall performance. When we do play like that and everybody plays seven, eight or nine out of 10, we look a good side.”
Saints’ win took their points haul to 15 for the season so far and was enough to see them creep back into the top six, so Wright has been content with his team after the first round of fixtures.
“We said before the game, let’s win it, get into the top six and we’ll assess,” he added.
“That’s what we’ve done and the players are a wee bit disappointed actually. They feel they should have had three or four more points, but I think we’re in a great position and I think if you maintain that sort of form we should be in the top six.
“I reckon 45 points would probably guarantee you top six if you take that through into the next tranche of games, so it’s a good start but there’s still room for improvement.”
Wright will welcome back Frazer Wright into the squad, despite his three- game league ban, and said that striker Steven MacLean remarkably has an “outside chance” of making it, despite his knee problem.
But he added: “The medical team is of the opinion that it’s maybe too risky.
”I think we’ve got away with what we thought the injury was going to be and if you had said to me at 5pm last Saturday he was only going to be out for three weeks I’d be doing cartwheels.
“His knee is making good progress and we’ll assess it, but the likelihood is he’ll be back for Hearts or Kilmarnock. If not Hearts, definitely Kilmarnock.”