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Hamilton host St. Johnstone with no pressure

The hosts have already knocked out one premier league team in this year's League Cup

The most pleasant surprise of the Championship, Hamilton, full of optimism, are expecting the premiere league team of St. Johnstone in the third round of the League Cup. Hamilton are the only ones with no defeats after six rounds. So far they've received two goals in the Championship, and in the second round of the League Cup they've knocked out one team from the Premier League. These are great results for Alex Neil's young team who are full of confidence for the next meeting, but also without pressure.

- This is a game that we can enjoy as there is no pressure on us. We are top of the Championship and beat Kilmarnock in the last round, but St Johnstone are a well-established Premiership side who were playing in Europe recently. They are favourites but we will give it a go - Hamilton's coach announced the meeting.


Neil hopes that defender Gordon, who injured himself during the weekend, will be ready to play. Midfielder Routledge is absent since earlier.


The Saints had a great season opening. They surprised with their good qualification meetings for the Europa League (their win against Rosenborg and undeserved knock out from Minsk), but after that they fell into the negative series of games. The fatigue due to an early start of the season might be to blame for that, some of it is due to a difficult fixture because of which so far St. Johnstone took only one point in the last four rounds. In the last round they were defeated on Celtic Park in a duel in which they took the game when Celtic, due to fatigue as their coach explains it, fell a bit. They use that period as an encouragement prior to visiting Hamilton.


- We didn't start the game very well but if we had finished the game the way we began, then we might have got something. We probably gave Celtic too much respect in the first half but in the second 45 we got in their faces and gave a better account of ourselves. Now we need to take that into the Hamilton game. If we perform like we did in the later part of the game at Celtic Park, we should qualify. It will be a different test for us but we are professionals. We are the Premiership team and it's down to us to go there and stamp our authority on the match - says the optimistic visitors' forward MaClean.


The visitors will only be missing midfielder Robertson who's heavily injured.

The key strength of both Hamilton and St. Johnstone is defense. The Accies have conceded only two goals in six Championship fixtures, just one in three home games. St. Johnstone, on the other hand, have conceded four goals in their last two games, but take Celtic out of the equation and we can conclude that they have kept a clean sheet in four out of six games. Hibs scored two against them, and Dundee United got a quick four in an unusual match, but those were completely different encounters from this one. Even in the Europa League prelims, we could see a well-organized team that conceded only twice in those two games.
Both teams' strikers are not in a very good form. Hamilton have scored ten goals in six league fixtures and St. Johnston only seven in as many games. I expect a similar match today to Kilmarnock vs. Hamilton (0-1), where the away team got away with a win after a set-piece goal. Since this is a one-game cup tie and the stakes are high, I don't believe we will see many goals.