St Johnstone 0-0 Dundee Utd: Tayside rivals draw comfort

A DENIZEN in the main stand turned to the bloke next to him and said this derby resembled a listless end-of-season affair. He was quickly reminded that the season is not even a month old.

Bookings: Dundee United - Rankin, Dillon.

Attendance: 5048

Yet, both managers succeeded in drawing comfort from an encounter with no goals and only three shots on target. Essentially because it wasn’t a defeat, it seemed.

United, off the back of the awful 3-1 loss at Kilmarnock, had an acceptable end to the week with the club holding on to Johnny Russell and Gary Mackay-Steven then holding their SPL position.

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The home team, meanwhile, may now have only garnered two points from five games, but at least yesterday they improved on their previous weekend’s result at Easter Road.

That was the basic thrust of the post-match take offered up by Tannadice manager Peter Houston and his counterpart Steve Lomas. Houston though, unlike the Irishman, didn’t seek to make any great claims for a “typical derby that wasn’t a classic by any manner of means” and found his team “too slow and too deliberate”.

He accepted United missed “a wee spark” owing to Mackay-Steven’s absence after undergoing a tidy-up knee operation. It unearthed that there was more to tidy up than shown by the pre-op scan, and it is likely to mean the winger will be unavailable for a full six weeks.

At least he won’t be unavailable permanently after feverish speculation surrounded his future and that of Russell in the days leading up to the transfer window shutting. And Houston made his thoughts plain on the £1.25 million joint bid Huddersfield lodged for the duo on Friday. “It was a derisory offer from Huddersfield,” he said. “Which makes me wonder why they can get £8m, plus a sell-on for what they think is their best player [Jordan Rhodes] and they want to get our two best players and two young up-and-coming, I think, future internationals for £1.25m. I just laugh at that. It is an absolute joke and shows you what they think of us up here.”

They wouldn’t have thought much of a scrap that came down to home keeper Alan Mannus blocking Stuart Armstrong early on, and two stops from Radoslaw Cierniak in either half. He was the first goalie called into action, after the lively Peter Pawlett – in his first game on loan to Saints from Aberdeen – tested him in a move that began with him nutmegging Barry Douglas. The key moment probably came in the 83rd minute, however, when substitute Nigel Hasselbaink found himself through on goal but shot too close to the keeper. “You hope to take those,” said Lomas. The St Johnstone manager appears willing to take anything right now, curiously going on about how there were a “lot of positives”.

“I’m happy with the clean sheet, happy with the performance,” said the St Johnstone manager, who is “hopeful” of adding out-of-contract Mark Kerr to his squad. “You know, you always want the result when you play well, but we haven’t got it the last two weeks. It’s coming, though. Anybody watching would see that against a good Dundee United team we probably made them look quite ordinary. We cut out the silly mistakes that cost us against Hibs and I said to the lads if they keep doing the same things it will turn for us.”

Pawlett, acquired till January, looks as if he could do a turn for the Perth side. Of the impish ilk, the attacker lasted only 69 minutes before going down with a “little bit of rising damp”, Lomas called it. It was only when Pawlett appeared that it became clear it was rhyming slang for cramp. “I’ve got my basic fitness but haven’t been playing many games,” said the 21-year-old Englishman. The limited exposure led the youngster, with his agent, to initiate a loan move away from Pittodrie.

United midfielder John Rankin felt his side did well enough in an encounter that came after he stayed up late the night before to discover whether any team-mates, including Gavin Gunning, might end up ex-team-mates. “There has been lots of speculation about all three in the past month and I’m delighted we could hold on to them.

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“After training on Friday we heard that Johnny Russell was going here, there and everywhere and he was sitting next to us having lunch. I think some of the boys were fuelling the rumours just for a laugh.”

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