Dare to dream ...and make a little bit of history

Ambitious Buddies boss Jim Goodwin is targeting the club’s best league finish in over 30 years.

Former skipper Goodwin led St Mirren to ninth spot from the dugout last season, the Paisley side’s best showing since Danny Lennon’s squad picked up a joint-eighth finish with Kilmarnock in the 2013/14 Premiership campaign.

But he insists a repeat of ninth spot in the upcoming season would be a disappointment, as he takes aim at continued improvement and a lofty top-six spot.

Goodwin told Express Sport: “There’s an expectation for us to keep improving and first and foremost that comes from within.

“I don’t want St Mirren to be a survival club. I stressed that enough last season.

“I look at the infrastructure in terms of training facilities, the stadium, the fanbase, the squad we’re putting together.

“We shouldn’t be satisfied to just be finishing second bottom and stay in the league.

“We have to make progress.

“If we finish ninth next year then that’s not good enough as far as I’m concerned.

“There will be some people out there who would snap your hand off for that right now as that means Premiership football for next season.

“But I don’t want us to rest on our laurels and to be happy about finishing down at the bottom end of the table.

“I want us to be genuine contenders for forcing our way into that top half. If we finish seventh or eighth then that’s progress.

“The club hasn’t finished higher than eighth since 1989, so let’s try and be around that mid-table mark - seventh, sixth or fifth.

“Let’s see if, come the split, we can be in the mix for challenging for a spot in the top half of the table.

“It’s where I want to be and so do the players, the staff, the fans and the directors.”

Goodwin’s charge on the top six will start on Saturday August 1, when they take on last season’s surprise package Livingston at the Simple Digital Arena.

The gaffer believes the Lions have shown the way for smaller clubs to break into the top half of the table after Gary Holt’s men enjoyed a stunning run to fifth place last season.

He said: “Kilmarnock, St Johnstone and Livingston are clubs that are the perfect example that show it can be done.

“They are the ones I look at all the time.

“When I’m having conversations with Tony Fitzpatrick and other people here, those are the things we are discussing.

“When I took the job on 12 months ago I wanted to make sure the board of directors had similar ambitions to my own.

“I didn’t want us to just be a team happy to survive and they’ve matched that ambition as they’ve invested well in the squad.

“As a manager you would always like a bit more in the budget to bring in more quality, but I’m realistic about the situation.

“The higher up the table we can finish then everything else comes with it.

“It becomes easier to get sponsorship on the commercial side of things, prize money goes up the higher up you get, and you might go on longer cup runs too with a better squad.

“The majority of that money goes back in to the playing budget which again allows me to put a better product out on the park, which in turn leads to better season ticket sales and getting more fans in through the gate.

“It all has a knock-on effect.

“As a club, we have to put that message out there that we are extremely ambitious and are determined to do everything we can to try to emulate the likes of Kilmarnock, Motherwell and St Johnstone in recent seasons.

“If we don’t aim for that then what’s the point?”