The key areas where St Mirren v Hearts was won and lost

Stephen Robinson’s side are a hard-working and well-coached team, but Hearts were the masters of their own downfall in Paisley. Ryan Strain’s seventh-minute goal, so cheaply given away, allowed the home side to play the game on their terms and left Steven Naismith’s men with a mountain to climb as captain Lawrence Shankland noted. A mountain, in the end, that proved to be insurmountable.

So where did it all go wrong on Saturday? Unsurprisingly, there are a few causes for concern once we dig into the details.

The shape

When the starting XI was announced an hour or so before kick-off, there were a few puzzled faces in the press box. The back four seemed straightforward enough but there were more questions than answers after that. There were three central midfielders – Cammy Devlin, Beni Baningime and Calem Nieuwenhof – included in the line-up, a sole winger in Kenneth Vargas and the usual front pairing of Liam Boyce and Lawrence Shankland. What was the formation?

Various theories were bandied about. Maybe it was a flat 4-3-3, with Vargas on the right and Boyce on the left? Or perhaps it was a 4-3-1-2, with Vargas and Shankland leading the line and Boyce dropping in behind them? To the best of my knowledge, no one correctly predicted the unusual shape that Naismith opted for.

When the game got under way, it soon transpired that it was a three-man midfield with Boyce and Shankland up top, and Vargas playing on the left. It left a big hole at right wing that Devlin, who has extended his deal with the club, would occupy every now and then but it was a lopsided approach. 

It was therefore no surprise that Hearts quickly targeted the left flank, identifying it as the team’s most likely route to goal. The ball was regularly worked to Stephen Kingsley with the intention of releasing Vargas down the left, but there was a problem: very quickly, it was established that it didn’t look like a particularly promising avenue to explore. Vargas and Kingsley often found themselves crowded out, and they couldn’t find a way around the press.

READ MORE: St Mirren 1 Hearts 0: Instant analysis as Naismith's side struggle to get going

“[Devlin] wasn’t so much playing out on the wing,” Naismith explained after the match. “When we are in possession you will have seen players all over the pitch, it wasn’t so much that he was playing there. I just felt that having the three midfielders gave us a wee bit more security when we were out of possession and at times that did help us. But that’s not the difference in the game – the difference in the game is in both boxes.”

The build-up

Naismith is right but St Mirren got themselves into dangerous areas with regularity, despite only having 30 per cent possession, while Hearts rarely advanced into the opposition area as they laboured on the ball. That was partly down to the home side’s excellent pressing, but they were also helped by the fact that Hearts didn’t appear to have too many ideas of how to break their opponents down.

Take a look at Hearts’ passing map above. The dots show the average position of each player and the bigger the dot, the more passes were received by that player. As we can see, the vast majority of Hearts’ possession was on the left flank around the halfway line. Kingsley would often receive the ball but it often took a while to get there – when it eventually did, the left-back had very few options other than playing a simple pass infield to Nieuwenhof or turning back towards Kye Rowles.

It was a ploy that the Buddies were well aware of from the get-go. Strain would push up and Conor McMenamin would drop as the pair applied pressure from either side of Kingsley. Right-sided centre-half Marcus Fraser would drift wide to ensure St Mirren wouldn’t be caught out by a long ball, and then Keanu Baccus would shuttle over to try and block the infield pass. The pressing map below shows where Robinson’s side applied pressure across the pitch and as we can see, most of it took place in this area. It was a problem that Hearts simply couldn’t find a solution to.

Strikers starved

A combination of St Mirren’s pressing and a lack of imagination from Hearts resulted in a largely predictable outcome: Boyce and Shankland struggled to truly threaten Zach Hemmings’ goal. A rare foray down the right in the first half saw the ball played into Boyce, whose strike was clean enough but was blocked by the excellent Alex Gogic. Shankland, meanwhile, didn’t have a meaningful shot on goal until he was denied by Hemmings at the death in a one v one.

The reason? A distinct lack of service. Passing in and around the opposition box is an area that has improved on Naismith’s watch but that progress was conspicuous by its absence at the SMiSA Stadium. Across the 90 minutes, Hearts mustered just five passes into the St Mirren area from open play. Three of them were played by Boyce, and the other two were played by Shankland: the two players who should really be on the receiving end.

Of the 35 touches Shankland had during the course of the game, only five were in the St Mirren box. Boyce, meanwhile, had two. This is in part due to the compact and deep defence employed by Robinson, but it was an issue that the players were well aware of heading into the game.

READ MORE: Hearts fans short changed with team lacking identity

“There isn’t much, that's how they play,” Shankland when asked about space in the post-match press conference. “Their back three is really narrow and it is quite difficult to find space. Then when you get to wide areas, you need quality balls into the box and to try and find people. Are we getting that? Probably not. It’s not an individual thing, that’s a collective. Final balls need improved.”

Shankland wasn’t wrong. Hearts attempted 13 crosses in total on Saturday (including set-pieces), yet only two found their intended target. More creativity is required in midfield to unlock a stubborn defence, so that Hearts can work the ball to their most potent goal threat – and he simply didn’t get it until deep into second-half stoppage time.

The early goal gave St Mirren precisely what they wanted, and what Hearts will have dreaded: a lead to defend. As soon as Strain rolled the ball into Zander Clark’s unguarded net, the difficulty of the challenge facing Naismith’s men increased exponentially. The team’s lopsided shape made their attacks predictable, and the hosts’ clever pressing largely kept Hearts penned in in areas where they couldn’t do any real damage. That resulted in Boyce and Shankland barely having a sniff – at which point, defeat became almost inevitable.