Around The Premiership Recap: Week One, Day One

The first day of the Scottish Premiership is in the books. Things went mostly as expected with surprises mostly coming in terms of the margin instead of the results.

Day one of the new season in Scotland has come and gone with four matches having been completedd.

Hibernian 1 – 0 St. Mirren

This was more or less the expected result. Hibernian largely controlled play but struggled to find the right look and missed a handful of good ones when they did create them. Scott Allan is the one who found the game-winner late in the match to collect all three points just when it seemed like Hibernian would leave with a disappointing draw.

St. Mirren did have a couple of chances of their own, and even if Hibs was in control of the game most of the way, St. Mirren didn’t look totally dead in the water.

Given that this was largely the expected result of Hibs controlling and winning a competitive game there isn’t automatically anything much to take from this. Given that Hibs has already encountered some injury issues in the preseason they should feel good to come away with all three points regardless of who the opponent is.

For St. Mirren, they are likely kicking themselves for not managing to quite finish off the defensive performance to come away with a draw, especially since they had a couple of excellent chances to put a goal in themselves.

Livingston 0 – 0 Motherwell

Not as boring a match as the 0-0 draw might lead you to believe. There were some excellent chances, one of which nearly saw a spectacular bicycle kick converted. It is tough to say exactly, but Livingston certainly can’t come away upset with this result as they not only came away with points but they did it with the exact same formula that led to a successful season for them previously.

Their combination of organized defense and a miserable plastic pitch just made things tough and one could even argue they outplayed Motherwell in the match. There was one chance in particular where Livingston caught Motherwell without their keeper in goal that they ought to have put one in, but aside from that (and a couple other) missed chances things went largely according to plan for them.

For Motherwell, this isn’t a terrible result. Livingston’s sticky plastic pitch caused a lot of teams to go to Tony Macaroni Arena confident of pummelling what effectively remains a League 1 roster and left complaining about Livingston purposefully making the pitch as sticky and slow as possible. Motherwell typically see themselves as a top 6 club, which means not taking all 3 points does hurt, but if Livingston does this for very long this season it will just become an accepted part of the league that you can’t really judge anything based on how they play at Livingston.

Ross County 3 – 0 Hamilton Academical

Given that they are popularly being picked to finish well away from relegation, Ross County being able to defeat Hamilton wasn’t a surprise. The fact that they did it in what can only be described as a dominant 3-0 fashion was a surprise.

Hamilton looked totally overmatched and rarely threatened Ross County. This is either a very good sign for the newly promoted Ross County or a very bad sign for Hamilton. Perhaps Ross County is every bit as ready for the Premiership as the more optimistic pundits claim and this match is a sign that they truly are comfortably more capable than the clubs that will be fighting to avoid relegation.

On the other hand, maybe this is a sign that Hamilton’s days as the cockroach of the Premiership are coming to an end and whatever dark magic they’ve used to so narrowly avoid relegation so many times has finally worn off.

Or maybe this is a sign that Hamilton is just as bad as last season but they will still somehow manage to get 33 points and finish 10th on goal differential or something.

And that’s it for the first day of the greatest league on earth!

Wasn’t there a 4th match?

Oh, um, yeah Celtic played St Johnstone but I don’t think we really need to talk about that right now. In fact I am definitely going to wait to see how Rangers fare before I decide exactly what I feel about the thrashing Celtic just gave out.