St Johnstone 1 - 5 Dundee Utd: 5-star United stun Saints

The Tannadice men benefited from two own goals against their Tayside rivals as Peter Enckelman’s dreadful first-half error caught out Steven Anderson and Callum Davidson bundled into his own net after the interval.

But, after Anderson had made amends with a close-range strike 25 minutes from time, United finished an incredible match in style with three goals in the last seven minutes.

Headers by Russell and skipper Jon Daly, and an injury-time goal for new signing Milos Lacny – following another mistake by Enckelman – put a shine on another stunning outing for United, who moved into the top six with a deserved three points.

Russell insisted that victory at McDiarmid Park had been a greater challenge than the previous week’s 2-0 cup triumph against Rangers at Ibrox.

He said: “We’ve been getting our act together for a few weeks now. We lost a lot of points early on in the season and we’re playing catch-up now to try to get ourselves into the top six.

“We knew that this would, in some ways, be a harder game than the week before against Rangers. We came off the high of that and there’s always the chance you’re not going to perform as well.”

United manager Peter Houston had criticised their first-half performance as “rubbish” and Russell did admit that the emphatic scoreline did not tell the whole story of a game that had been dominated by St Johnstone for the opening half-an-hour.

He added: “In the first half, I thought we were really poor. We couldn’t get going and we were lucky to go in 1-0 up. In the second half, we took our chances and that was the turning point.

“The manager had a wee go at us at half-time, but we knew ourselves that we were poor, by our own standards.”

The Perth men do not have long to recover from the hammering, with Hearts the visitors in tomorrow night’s William Hill Scottish Cup replay.

Manager Steve Lomas has confessed he has a difficult decision to make on whether to stick with the blundering Enckelman or draft in Northern Ireland internationalist Alan Mannus.

Lomas said: “Peter is big enough to understand that he’s made some mistakes – but he wasn’t the only one.

“Collectively, we probably weren’t at the levels we were at in the second-half against Hearts.

“I’m trying to digest a 5-1. We’ll have a look at (the goalkeeper situation), we’ll not jump to too many rash decisions and we’ll analyse the game.

“I’ve got to extract myself from the emotion (in the aftermath of Saturday’s game) and have a look at it, and make the right decision for what is a big game for us on Tuesday night.”