St Mirren Manager Craig McLeish Sets Clear Priorities for New Campaign
St Mirren manager Craig McLeish has drawn a thick line under his priorities for the new campaign: defend properly, or forget about the top six.
The Paisley club survived by the skin of their teeth last season, clinging to their Premiership status through the play-offs after McLeish stepped in to replace Stephen Robinson. The contrast is stark. Robinson had delivered three consecutive top-half finishes and a League Cup triumph. McLeish inherited a side used to punching above its weight – and almost watched it fall through the trapdoor.
That close call has sharpened his focus.
“If you just aim at surviving in this league and you fall short of that, you're in trouble,” he said, laying out the standard. “We have to aim as high as we possibly can and top six and European qualification is what we're going to strive to achieve.”
There is ambition, then. But it comes wrapped in a very clear warning.
Defence first, but with a twist
McLeish’s message is old-school in one sense. St Mirren, he insists, cannot lose the identity that carried them to those recent high points.
“We have to be hard to play against. We have to enjoy keeping clean sheets. We have to love defending and being aggressive in everything we do,” he said. Those are not throwaway lines. For a club of St Mirren’s size, defensive discipline has long been non-negotiable.
Yet this is not a manager content to sit in and suffer. The Buddies rattled in 12 goals in the Premier Sports Cup group stage, and McLeish has been bold enough to tweak the structure to squeeze more threat out of his side.
“The way we're playing with an extra attacker, with some of the bodies we've brought in, hopefully that's the bit that we can solve this season as well,” he explained. The challenge is to stretch the pitch without tearing up the foundations that kept the club competitive.
So the balance becomes everything: keep the snarling, compact St Mirren that opponents hate facing, and bolt on a more adventurous edge.
“It's keeping those core bits and then adding the attacking side to it as well,” McLeish said. “We want it to be exciting. We want it to be good to watch, fun for the players to play in. I want it to be enjoyable for the supporters. We will be hard working, we'll be high energy and we have to be tough to beat first and foremost.”
Tough to beat, but worth paying to watch. That is the tightrope.
Nsio arrives, Sulemana deal collapses
To walk it, McLeish knows he still needs more bodies.
The club have moved to bring in 20-year-old Rangers midfielder Paul Nsio on loan, a deal the manager clearly views as a crucial piece of his puzzle.
“Paul brings us a kind of level of physicality and athleticism that we can't source,” he said. “He can cover a number of different positions.”
Versatility, power, running – the attributes of a player designed for a high-energy system. Nsio’s ability to plug gaps across the pitch could prove vital if McLeish persists with an extra attacker and needs the midfield to do more of the dirty work.
Not every target has landed. A move for Ghanaian midfielder Abdul Hakim Sulemana has fallen through, underlining the reality of St Mirren’s market. They have to be smart, opportunistic, and sometimes patient.
McLeish, though, has set the tone. The objectives are clear, the style is defined, and the margins are thin. St Mirren have lived both sides of this league in the past two years – top half and play-off peril.
The question now is simple: can a team built on aggression and clean sheets really crash the European conversation again, while daring to attack with one more man?
