St Mirren boss Jim Goodwin insists his confident side are looking forward to trying to seal an incredible double over Celtic tonight.
The Buddies haven’t beaten the Hoops home and away in the same season since the 1989/90 campaign when club legend Tony Fitzpatrick was in the dugout.
While Goodwin is wary of the fact Neil Lennon’s side will be eager for revenge after St Mirren outplayed the Glasgow side to pick up three points at Parkhead recently, he believes his players believe they can produce a repeat performance in Paisley this evening.
“The pressure is always on the Old Firm, there’s no getting away from that,” Goodwin told Express Sport.
“I do think they’ll be wanting to make amends for what happened at Parkhead, there’s no doubt about that.
“They certainly won’t underestimate us and they certainly won’t turn up here and expect an easy game.
“I don’t think they’ll enjoy coming here because we’ve played well here.
“The players are comfortable in their home stadium and we’ll make the evening as difficult as possible for Celtic as we can.
“We’re not going to over consume ourselves with Celtic. We need to remember the great performance we had at Parkhead and why we got the result we did.
“We played really well and played some great football. That first goal we scored, if it had been Celtic or Rangers, then you would have seen a hell of a lot more of it.
“We scored from Jak Alnwick, worked our way all the way up the pitch with one and two-touch football before putting it in the back of the net.
“That’s the kind of thing we’re encouraging, that’s what we’re working on every day in training and it’s great for me now as manager to be able to sit back and watch the things we work on in training happen in games.
“We look forward to the Celtic game. We’ve got a run of games coming up that are extremely difficult.
“Celtic followed by a trip to Aberdeen, they don’t get much tougher than that.
“But we’re looking forward to it. We don’t go into it nervously or worrying about the opposition.
“We respect them. Celtic have a brilliant team with fantastic players, millions and millions of pounds worth of talent on the park, but my lads believe in themselves and believe they’re good enough to go and get another positive result.”
St Mirren go into tonight’s clash with the Hoops brimming with confidence on the back of a comprehensive win over Kilmarnock on Saturday.
Goodwin says that victory was one of the most enjoyable due to the all-round performance his side produced.
He said: “It was an excellent 90 minutes. We’ve had many games where we put in a good 45 minutes and then we’re poor in the second half.
“In other matches we’ve been slow to come out of the traps and then played pretty well after the break. I’ve been looking for that consistent level of performance and I think we got that against Kilmarnock.
“It was the most comfortable I’ve felt on the touchline for a number of weeks. We were solid defensively, we were controlling the game in midfield and up front we looked like we were going to cause them problems every time we got into the final third.
“The only criticism I have, and I spoke to them about this afterwards, is we need to get more shots off.
"We had 15 during the game and six of them were on target, but we had four or five really good chances in the first half where we needed to believe in ourselves a bit more when it comes to pulling the trigger.
“But that was the only negative. We were the better team and fully deserved our win.”
With Kristian Dennis and Collin Quaner ruled out tonight through injury, Goodwin may well turn to striker Eamonn Brophy to help find a winner that would give St Mirren’s chances of staying in the top half a serious boost.
When asked if Brophy is the type of player the Buddies need to make the top six, Goodwin replied: “Absolutely. We wouldn’t have brought Eamonn to the club otherwise.
“He’s a really, really good player. He’s still just trying to get up to speed in terms of fitness levels, because our boys have been working tirelessly since pre-season up to now.
“Our lads are a little bit ahead of where Eamonn needs to get to, but in fairness to him he’s knuckling down and working hard in training.
“We feel like he’s still got a little bit to go but he’s certainly getting there. He’s not quite as sharp as he needs to be just yet. With playing games that will definitely come.
“Eamonn has scored against Celtic a few times already in his career.
"He knows exactly what it takes and hopefully we’ll get him his first goal against Celtic on Wednesday. That would be lovely.”
