St Mirren academy star Conor McBrearty hopes his Challenge Cup experience can help fire him into the Saints first team.
The talented defensive midfielder turned in an excellent shift in holding midfield in Wales, dominating the middle of the park despite the age advantage of his opponents.
Although the heavy 4-1 defeat to Wrexham put paid to Colts’ hopes of a quarter-final spot, McBrearty will use every minute of the Challenge Cup run this season that will give him every chance of breaking into the first team.
The 19-year-old St Mirren player said: “We’ve had a really good run but me and the boys all wanted to get a result and get into the next round of the cup.
“That’s not happened and it comes down to mistakes and errors we’ve made for their goals.
“If we want to get further on we’re going to have to cut that out of our game.
“The cup has been great, not just for me, but for all the boys. It’s an amazing experience coming away and it gives you lots of confidence beating senior teams.
“We’ve outplayed a lot of them too – even Wrexham we outplayed for large spells.
“It makes it real, as opposed to the reserve league which sometimes can be a bit false.
“This kind of environment is unrivalled in what it can do for a player. We’ll take positives from the run.
“I think there’s lots of boys in that reserve side that have the potential to kick on. Hopefully, the manager will see that too.”
Much like St Mirren’s first team at the moment, the young Buddies created a host of chances but failed to capitalise by finding the back of the net.
And while winger Jay Henderson did pull one back in the second half, ultimately it was the near misses in the first 45 minutes that cost the Colts dear.
McBrearty said: “We went in really happy with ourselves with the first-half performance. It was only 0-0 but we’d created lots of chances throughout.
“The goal straight after half-time gave them momentum and I thought we actually did well to come back into the game.
“But we shot ourselves in the foot for the third goal and the fourth one is just irrelevant after that.
“Even in this cup we’ve struggled to put the ball in the net. We’ve had three 1-0 wins with lots of chances.
“I think that is something we’re going to need to work on.
“If we’d capitalised on all the possession we had in the first half we could have ran away with the game.”
While Colts coach Allan McManus was disappointed with how the youngsters bowed out of the cup in the second half, he insists the run will help all the academy prospects in the future.
He said: “It’s been a fantastic run for the boys and an excellent experience.
“There’s a lot of positives to take going forward.”
