STEVIE Mallan cannot wait to play in his first cup final for St Mirren – but insisted this weekend’s league match away to Ayr United is the biggest game of their season. Mallan was on the scoresheet on Sunday as the Paisley side swept aside Welsh team The New Saints 4-1 to reach the Irn-Bru Cup final against Dundee United next month.
St Mirren’s cup form has stood in stark contrast to their league efforts where they find themselves eight points behind Ayr at the bottom of the Ladbrokes Championship, with just 13 games of the season left. The two sides meet at Somerset Park on Saturday in what is shaping up to be a pivotal match.
The midfielder said: “This will be my first cup final since I came in to the first team so it will be something I’ll really look forward to. A lot of the boys in the squad are quite young so it will be a first final for a few of them as well.
“But we have to leave that to one side for now and concentrate on Ayr as that will be the biggest game of our season so far.
“First of all we have make sure we don’t go into League One. That’s our immediate priority. But we have to aim high. Now that’s hard to do but we want to do everything we can to get out of the rut we are in just now.
“We have to try claw back the points to Ayr and Dumbarton. The next few games are very important and hopefully winning in the past few weeks in the two cups will give us a confidence booster. Our cup form has actually been great, we just need to take that into the league.
“All the boys had said going into the two cup ties this month that we needed to get two wins to try to get us on a bit of a roll going into the league game with Ayr. And we’ve done that by scoring four goals at home which is something we’ve not done for a long time.”
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