TREVOR CARSON was the hero for St Mirren as the goalkeeper denied Dundee three times in a penalty shoot-out to ensure his side remain in the hat for this afternoon’s Scottish Cup fifth-round draw.
Both teams struggled to truly lay a glove on each other on a chilly afternoon in Paisley and after 120 goalless minutes had passed, the tie went to penalties where the hosts ultimately triumphed.
Carson lapped up the adulation from the home fans but Buddies manager Stephen Robinson insisted that another behind-the-scenes figure deserves his share of the credit too.
“Ultimately what we got out of that is through to the next round,” he said. “We weren’t at our best obviously – that goes without saying.
“As a team we made poor decisions on the ball and we hold our hands up to that. But in the cup you just need to get through and we’ve got through. Trevor made three excellent penalty saves and deserves a lot of credit. And so does Jamie Langfield, our goalkeeping coach, because he called Trevor over just before the shoot-out and gave him info about every single Dundee player and what way they were going to go with their penalties.
READ MORE: Three things we learned as St Mirren knock Dundee out of Scottish Cup on penalties
“And he got every one of them right. So big credit to Trevor and to Jamie. The other positives were the four boys who came on. Overall, we know we’re better than that. We played brilliantly in our last three league games and got one point. We didn’t play particularly well today and we’re through to the next round. And I’ll probably take today out of those two.”
Robinson continued: “We have been brilliant the last three games. We were great at Celtic when I looked back, against a top side.
“We were brilliant in both games against Hearts - but we didn’t get a whole lot out of the games. We just didn’t click as a group but we made changes and it helped a bit.
“Sometimes the decision-making isn’t right but we stayed solid and ground it out.
“My preference in the next round is a home tie because that’s us 11 unbeaten here. We didn’t play particularly well but we are through and with that record, we must be doing something right.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here