Robinson hopes homework pays off ahead of cup final
Boss studies Nancy’s former team as he plots victory
ST MIRREN manager Stephen Robinson revealed he has been watching footage of MLS side Columbus Crew in a bid to gain an idea of what to expect from Wilfried Nancy’s Celtic in the Premier Sports Cup final.
The Buddies face the Hoops at Hampden on Sunday, with Robinson conceding that the William Hill Premiership champions will be strong favourites to lift the trophy.
Nancy took charge of his first Celtic match at the weekend, suffering a 2-1 defeat at home to Hearts, after joining the Glasgow club from Columbus Crew.
Robinson will also be tuning in when the Hoops face Roma in the Europa League tomorrow night, and hopes to glean as much information as he can.
“We have to see what the new manager does,” he said. “You can’t change the players, so they’ll still have the same personnel.
“We’ve watched a little bit of Columbus Crew already, seeing certain things that he does.
“Whether he implements them with Celtic will remain to be seen but, ultimately, Celtic have got good players.
“They spend millions of pounds assembling their squad. They expect to win the cup every year, so what the new manager does in the short period of time, we’ll see, but we know it’s going to be a hard task.
“No matter who is the manager, they’ve got top-quality players.”
Robinson also revealed that his players have chosen to keep their cup build-up as low key as possible by sticking to their usual schedule.
He added: “This is, for some players, a once-in-a-lifetime in their career but we want to keep it as normal as possible.
“They didn’t want suits, they didn’t want to go to a hotel. I’ve done both at Motherwell, where we went to hotels, took everybody out. They didn’t want that. They want to play the game, not have any emotions towards it and then enjoy, I hope, the celebrations afterwards.”
Saints go into the cup final boosted by a 2-0 league victory over Dundee United in Paisley on Saturday.
Goals from Conor McMenamin and Keanu Baccus sealed a first league victory since late September.
Robinson felt his team had performed better in some of their recent defeats than they did against the Tangerines but took heart from the commitment shown to build on their 3-3 draw away to Aberdeen last Wednesday night.
“Football is a strange game because it’s probably the least control we had in a game in our run when we haven’t had wins,” he added.
“We said we wanted to go on a run now after the Aberdeen game. It was important to follow that up with a win.
“Of course there’s apprehension around the stadium, there’s apprehension from everybody, so it was just about getting over the line.
“We need to manage games better when we go 1-0 up, we’ve spoken about that. We’re a really quiet squad, so I end up having to do the management from the side, which you don’t want to do but you have to.
“But it was a proper performance in terms of grinding it out and scoring at good times.
“Overall, I’m just delighted to get back to winning ways.”