If we had all of the squad fit, I wonder how many of Saturday's starting line up would have been starting - and in the position they played? Not very many, that's for sure. Missing the central pairing of Deas and Devine together with Allardice is a big loss defensively, whilst the loss of the creativity of Dan MacKay, MacGregor and Samuels limits our attacking options. In addition we are without the often under appreciated Shane Sutherland whose importance to the team is reflected by the fact that he was the players' player of the season last year.
In those circumstances, I thought we played pretty well on Saturday. Mackay was rarely troubled in goal, we played some good passing football and created some decent chances. Shaw, in particular, had an excellent game. No doubt with the return of some of the injured players we will create more chances, but the question is, will we take them? Billy Mckay remains our main striker, he works his socks off and has scored 5 goals in all competitions this year, but his conversion rate is just 14% . Oakley has played in 17 games and scored just 2 goals with no assists. He's only had 7 shots in those 17 games. Doran is 7th on our all time scoring list but in 16 games he has only scored 1 goal with 1 assist. Boyd isn't shy at having a pop at goal but just 1 goal from 20 shots is a poor return.
Of the players out, only Samuels looks as though he might contribute a reasonable number of goals in a season and therefore it seems to me that we are over reliant on Mckay to get the goals. There is a lot of pressure on him and he gets a lot of attention from defenders, so we really do need others to step up and get their shooting boots on. We also need to be sharper in our attacks and have a bit more movement in the box to help Mckay find a bit more space. Given our injuries, we have performed pretty well defensively and in midfield. What we need now is to be more clinical in creating and taking chances up front.