18/01/2025 – QUEEN OF THE SOUTH (A)

The Scottish Cup provided a welcome distraction from 2025’s league woes for Saints, when the premier national cup competition gave us an appealing trip, for the fans at least, to Dumfries.

A sell out visiting support of just under 1,500 made the journey south to cheer on the Paisley men against their League One hosts, many of whom had travelled well in advance to sample the many pubs near the handily located Palmerston Park, only a short walk from the town centre.

The general mood in the pubs before the match was one of optimism that Saints would progress, however a tough game was expected against the team with one of the best home records in Scotland currently.

Manager Stephen Robinson had a surprise up his sleeve with the starting XI however, with 17 year old Callum Penman starting his first match for the club, and the sinner from last week Toyosi Olusanya, partnering Mikael Mandron up front.

We have spoken about Penman before on these pages, an outstanding player at youth level who was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for the manager, and the youngster did not let anyone down by providing an outstanding performance at right wing back.

The most obvious attribute young Callum possess is a long throw of frightening capability, and the lazy media will probably focus on this as he develops, but don’t be fooled by this.

We did open the scoring through one of his long throws after 10 minutes, but eleven minutes later a beautifully shaped whipped cross led directly to the second, and this is what we should be more excited about, as since Ryan Strain left, we haven’t really had this sort of craft from the right hand side.

Most impressive however at Dumfries, in our opinion, was the anticipation displayed by young Penman. Multiple times he broke up QoS attacks by intercepting passes and immediately bombing forward with the ball to put us into positive attacking situations.

Chief beneficiary of Penman’s creativity was Toyosi Olusanya, who had scored twice in the opening 21 minutes to consign last week to history, and take his total goals this season to a very respectable 10.

These two early goals made life very comfortable for Saints during a match that could have been pretty tricky indeed, and it looked like we would coast to the next round with relative ease as the game petered out, or so we thought.

With around 10 minutes remaining, Queen of the South unexpectedly scored, when Brennan Dickenson smashed in a terrific volley, briefly silencing the section of the Saints support that had been playfully mocking he winger.

Suddenly, we looked nervous. It was almost classic St. Mirren, but Caolan Boyd-Munce finally ended the match deep into injury time when he curled in a fine effort after a lightening break involving O’Hara and Oseni.

However, this was directly after a strong Queen of the South claim for a a penalty, when an attack was abruptly ended by Alex Gogic. It was hard to see at the time how much contact was made by our Cypriot superstar, but having watched Sportscene on Saturday night, all we will say is we are grateful VAR was not in operation at Palmerston.

Overall, it was a great day in Dumfries at one of the last remaining proper old grounds of Scottish football, that can boast the highest free standing floodlight pylons still in operation today in Scotland and the biggest remaining covered terracing. So we were told in the Robert The Bruce pub in Dumfries, and having checked the internet, appears to be true!

Saints now need to concentrate on the league. Aberdeen at Pittodrie are next, and of course the Dons haven’t won a league match since we broke their unbeaten start to the season in November.

Historically, we are very kind to teams desperate for a win, but we probably need the points more than the Dons, and any thoughts of sympathy should be as far from our minds as Toyosi is from our next penalty.

The manager has a very tough but welcome decision to make. Does he stick with Callum Penman or play the more experienced Elvis Bwomono? Will the performance of young Penman make him rethink his transfer strategy as the club continues to be linked with players in that position?

Tune in next week for answers as all will be revealed!

COYS!

QoS Players of the Match:

5 points – Callum Penman

3 points – Toyosi Olusanya

1 point – Mark O’Hara

Check our the Player of the Season race here –

PLAYER OF THE SEASON