St Mirren manager Stephen Robinson says a League Cup semi-final on the horizon won’t be a distraction for his players as they aim to continue their strong start to the season, and joked he might not even be in a job by the time that occasion comes around.
The Paisley side face Kilmarnock on Saturday just two weeks after a nervy penalty shoot-out victory at Rugby Park sealed a return to Hampden in the cup final four.
As he prepares his side for what he believes will be a tough encounter with “nothing between the sides” and three Premiership points at stake, Robinson said the upcoming match at the national stadium won’t be on his players’ minds over the next few weeks.
“You can’t focus on what is going to happen in three or four weeks,” the manager said. “We might not be in a job in three or four weeks’ time, in this industry.
“You concentrate on what’s in front of you.
“The players don’t need motivation. I’ve got a group of players that give me absolutely everything.
We can be very good or we can be below par but there’s never a lack of effort or enthusiasm.
“They approach every day in training as they do matches and I think that’s a really good trait to have.”
St Mirren travel to Kilmarnock looking for a third consecutive Premiership victory, and currently sit third in the table after six games. Robinson said he was pleased with how things were going and believed they could have even more than their tally of nine points.
“I think it’s been a really good start,” he said. “We’re seven unbeaten and I think we’ve lost one game in 18.
“As a manager and staff we’re really pleased with what we’ve got but we feel we could have more points.
“A couple of the decisions we’ve made could have went better for us but when we look on paper, we had a really, really difficult start and people said we would struggle.
“We haven’t. We’ve shown we can compete with everybody in this league and we’re in the semi-final of a cup.
“But that’s where you have to be very careful. You can’t let any complacency set in, you can’t think it’ll automatically happen and you’ll turn up and win football matches.
“We go to Kilmarnock tomorrow and we know there’s nothing between the sides, there was nothing between us in the cup and nothing between us in the last two seasons. We know we have to do the same things time and time again.
“Good teams do the simple things better than others and they continually do it. That’s what we have to reiterate.”
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