St Mirren 2 - 2 Dundee United: St Mirren and United share the spoils after crazy first-half spell

THE fact that St Mirren and Dundee United traded goals as prize-fighters would swap blows in sharing four strikes across eight first-half minutes made a mockery of claims that football can’t be played in force tens.

More than that, it proved the pair deserve their places among the Scottish Premier League heavyweights that their recent efforts have begun to claim them.

The upwardly mobile sixth-laced United and the Paisley team nestled directly behind them each felt that they could have won. Inevitably, St Mirren manager Danny Lennon had more grumbles about the final result. His team remain two places behind the fifth-placed Tayside men because they twice failed to hold on to a lead. They were one-up for a total of four minutes and 2-1 ahead – after a Graham Carey zoomer labelled a “bit special” by the St Mirren manager – for three minutes.

Lennon declared the real winners were the 3,811 punters who paid to watch in horrible driving wind and rain and were rewarded by a “thoroughly entertaining show”.

It was certainly more entertaining than his United counterpart Peter Houston claimed it possibly could be. In a radio interview beforehand he denounced the decision to allow the game to go ahead in the strongest possible terms. He called it a “joke”, claimed the fans would be “cheated” because the hoof into opponents’ penalty box would be a necessity, and that the lives of those who had travelled from Tayside to Paisley had been put at risk.

Even if what ensued on the park proved him spectacularly wrong in a fashion that he could be pleased about, he wasn’t for renouncing his earlier comments.

“It was a great game and credit to both sets of players for a thrilling game, but I still think it should have been called off,” he said. “We have weeks and weeks where we could have fitted this game in if it was put off. Both teams are doing well and both teams like to pass the ball and I think if it had been put off, we would have served up an even better thriller.”

The encounter was, at times, spiced up because of the freakiness caused to the trajectory of any high drive. But what provided an overload of festive cinnamon were the four goals one after the other that.

The bonanza started with Steven Thompson cranking a leg upwards to deflect an Aaron Mooy drive past Dusan Pernis after 27 minutes. Four minutes later a United break down the left allowed Paul Dixon to whip over a cross that Jon Daly forced in at close range for his 13th goal of the season.

In turn, that scoreline was history within minutes, Carey producing a 25-yard topper to put the home side back in front. But the Paisley side’s softness down the left was to prove their undoing again shortly afterwards with Stuart Armstrong nodding in at the near post, his first United goal created by a curling cross Gary Mackay-Steven delivered from right on the goal-line.

There was a little let-up in the howl and the hail come the start of the second period, but not in the admirable commitment both teams demonstrated to driving forward and getting the ball into the penalty box.

After an initial period of pressure from the Tannadice side, St Mirren then started to shuttle the ball around crisply and take control, McGowan proving the fulcrum. But as they upped their footballing quotient, their threat lessened, the home side’s play being concentrated in the middle third rather than the final third.

A winner would have been rough on the team it condemned and it never looked likely. What had been produced in the first 45 minutes was enough to justify the 90.