St Mirren keeper Jak Alnwick is fed up of speaking about the Buddies ambitions of reaching the top six and admits some of his teammates need a ‘reality check’ as Jim Goodwin’s side stumbled to an eighth draw in sixteen games this season when they faced Ross County of Wednesday.
The Buddies really should have scored three or four against Ross County and, after Jim Goodwin predicted his side were due to hand out a ‘doing’ to someone, Alnwick is sick of taking about performances when his side fail to take the points, saying: “I’m going to forget about saying the top six. I’m sick of saying it, I’m sick of going, ‘We’re going to get top six, we’re going to do this…’
St Mirren keeper Jak Alnwick isn’t happy (Photo by Mark Runnacles/Getty Images)
“Forget about that, we need to win a game. We need to win a game of football. It’s not looking ‘we need this, we need that’, load of rubbish. We need to go and win a game of football.
“No matter whether we turned up today with a scrappy 1-0 win and you run off celebrating in the 95th minute, I don’t care. Or whether you win 5-0 I couldn’t care less, we need to win a game of football.
“There’s a few people need to have a little bit of a reality check. Players need to start digging in and there’s times in the game where we need to be a bit more professional and get our shape.
“We had a go but it’s not good enough at home to Ross County who are down there fighting for their lives. Credit to them, they came and played an expansive game and left three-up at times and I thought they were brilliant but we need to come in and have a look at a few things and see what’s said.
“You put points on the board, not performances.”
The Englishman admits that he does “love” the style of play Goodwin is trying to enforce – calling sides like St Johnstone who are happy to sit off ‘boring’ – but thinks there needs to be some more thought from his teammates at times.
Alnwick likes to see his colleagues “get in people’s faces” with their high press but knows it can’t be something that happens every minute of the game.
If they can get that right and start taking their chances in front of goal, there’s a bright future ahead for St Mirren but Alnwick insists what he is seeing recently just isn’t good enough, adding: “I know the way that we’re trying to play, we’re trying to press teams and I love that. I’ve been at teams before where you sit off, there’s a lot of teams like Motherwell do it really well, St Johnstone do it, they sit off and I’ll be honest it’s not how I want to play, I think it’s boring.
“I think it’s good that we go and get in people’s faces but we’ve got to have a bit of a think at times.
“You can’t always do it for 90 minutes, we’ve just got to be a bit smarter in the way we press and then we’ve got to take our chances.
“I don’t know if it’s one goal in four or five games, something like that. It’s not good enough.”
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