'Nisbet should have scored a hat trick' - Sportscene analysis
Interesting Friday night in the odditorium of Scottish football.
Aberdeen and Hibs won again, Lewis Ferguson and Kevin Nisbet scored again, St Mirren lost again. That's six defeats in a row for Jim Goodwin's team, five of them by a single goal. What would he give for a creator and finisher?
Nisbet is now on six goals from eight league games and is halfway to matching team-mate Christian Doidge's 12 in 28 - and Alfredo Morelos' 12 in 26 - from 2019-20. He has made a terrific start to his Premiership career.
And the Ferguson-Ross McCrorie combo continues to deliver for Aberdeen. One of the pair has scored in five of the last six league games. They are getting buckets of penalties. But sustained pressure tends to find its reward.
The shame is that fans can't get in to see Aberdeen, Hibs and others at home and can't get on the road to watch them either. This argument will run and run as long as Covid-19 is with us and the gates are locked.
You can sit for hours cheek-by-jowl with strangers in a pressurised container that's an aeroplane but you can't socially distance in a football stadium. It's the riddle of the age. A head-scratcher and a head-wrecker.
The last few days have brought some portents of doom. The Challenge Cup has been ditched, Kilmarnock's game with Motherwell has been postponed, and among lower league clubs - whatever they may be saying in public - there is a rising unease about their ability to see the season through.
Six Kilmarnock players have tested positive. Down south, in a different code, there came a glimpse of what the immediate future might look like. Sale Sharks, contenders for the English Premiership rugby title, recorded 16 positive cases. Cue mayhem.
Unless Scottish football gets incredibly lucky, that kind of thing is coming our way - and probably soon. For all the imperfection of what we have now, enjoy it.
Sunday brings Celtic and Rangers back into the fray after their success in Europe. Neil Lennon's team visit Perth, Steven Gerrard's men have Ross County at Ibrox. Two games and some talking points....
The last thing St Johnstone need right now…
When you've lost three in a row and haven't scored in any of them - one goal in six - then you'd probably rather an afternoon in jail than a trip to Celtic Park, especially if you're St Johnstone and your record against the champions is almost record-breakingly bad.
Over the course of the last three years - a span of 10 games - Celtic have beaten St Johnstone 1-0, 2-0, 3-0, 4-0, 5-0, 6-0 and 7-0. The combined score is 31-0. Fourteen of the 31 have come at McDiarmid Park.
Callum Davidson's side are losing games narrowly. Four league defeats have been by a single goal, so it's not rocket science what's missing. Their top scorer has one goal. They have netted just four in nine league games. That's how many Nicke Kabamba has himself for Kilmarnock.
Celtic have been ticking along in the league. Nothing spectacular as yet. They have extra gears, though, and there were clear signs against Hibs that they were finding them.
Unless Davidson has found some magic in the meantime, this is an exercise in humiliation avoidance.
What do we make of Rangers now?
Nobody wants to wish the season away, but it would be fascinating to know where Steven Gerrard's team will be at come the spring.
Will James Tavernier still be banging in the goals? Will Scott Arfield still be pulling strings? Will Ryan Kent still be a heavily-influential character? Or will they all just fade away again?
Thursday brought another notable European performance and victory, sealed by two cracking goals. Galatasaray can now be added to a list of conquests that already include Rapid Vienna, Midtjylland, Legia Warsaw, Feyenoord, Porto and Braga.
In qualifying for the group stage of the Europa League, Rangers swelled their coffers by up to £10m, but they didn't really answer any questions about their capacity to go the distance in the league. They didn't because they couldn't. We'll have to wait.
We know that we've been here before with them. We've seen them stumble and fall. You can't take anything on trust.
On Sunday they host Ross County, a team they've never lost to. They met three times last season. The underdogs didn't score a goal.
Stuart Kettlewell's team have lost four of the last six. They got taken to the cleaners by Aberdeen last time out. Much like Davidson at St Johnstone, this looks like a day of endurance rather than enjoyment.
Where is the forward planning?
A while back, the SPFL tried to get a mandate from their clubs to call the season as they saw fit in the event of the pandemic bringing things to an early halt, as was the case last time.
Nobody wants a repeat of the confusion, suspicion and rancour that followed.
The clubs refused to grant the board the powers to deal with an early conclusion. A custard pie to the face was hardly a surprise given everything that happened in those vexed months, but there's been no update since.
We cannot discount the possibility that the virus stops football in its tracks again. If it does - and perish the thought - then there's still no plan in place to deal with the fallout.
If 50% of games are played, is that enough to declare champions and confirm relegation and promotion? Should the bar be higher - 60%, 70%, 75%? Or else is the league declared null and void?
No club knows where they stand, which is their own doing. The SPFL board tried to get a structure in place in case of an emergency and the clubs didn't want it.
Instead of sitting on their hands and hoping for the best, it's time everybody started moving on this again. Canvass the clubs and get a resolution.
