A big task ...
Jack Ross admits he didn’t fully realise what he was walking into at St Mirren
Nobody said it was going to be easy, that much is true.
But, rest assured, it soon dawned on Jack Ross the enormity of the task that he had inherited the day he walked through the doors of Greenhill Road to be unveiled as St Mirren manager.
They say love can blind you, and that may have been the case for Ross, ignoring the problems with rose-tinted specs as he set his targets upon promotion. It was, and remains, his aim for the club over the course of his tenure.
But, talking candidly to Express Sport in the close season, Ross conceded that he quickly realised the uphill task that he had taken on weeks after his appointment.
Thoughts of promotion were quickly extinguished thanks to crushing and demoralising defeats to the likes of Queen of the South and Renfrewshire rivals Morton, and fears of relegation at the bottom end of the division quickly had the club in their clutches.
Some less experienced managers would have panicked, thrown in the towel or struggled to deal with the day to day stresses of a relegation fight.
Instead, Ross remained composed and convinced the board to let him roll the dice and dramatically change the landscape of his squad.
Ten new players later and the rest, as they say, is history.
“I realised that I would have to temper my own expectations,” Ross admits. “I understood fairly quickly that I didn’t have the right players to play the way that I like to play football.
“Morton away was probably the night I realised that this just wasn’t going to work for me.
“In the interim period between then and the window opening, I thought our performances improved, and we picked up a couple of points here and there, but we were never going to go on the sort of run that we went on until we got