Morecambe fan here!
As you can imagine, a great many of us south of the border are keeping a bit of an eye on what's going on at St Mirren. There is a certain element of schadenfreude about the situation - although to be clear this is directed entirely at Robinson and O'Carroll, and not at St Mirren fans!
For the lowdown on Robinson with us - he came in at quite a difficult time. He only had three contracted players and essentially had to build a large amount of the squad from scratch. Not to mention he was starting a month behind most clubs due our play-off campaign.
He recruited some decent players but there were unfortunately a couple of pretty key gaps - a big aerial centre back, a defensive midfielder and our goalkeepers were very poor.
Started the season well, I think largely due to 'good vibes' following promotion and Cole Stockton being ridiculously good, but then around November/December the weaknesses began to catch up with us and our form and results took an absolute nosedive.
Robinson generally blamed personnel (although he did admit responsibility for this in his recruitment) and in fairness to him, he wasn't wrong. Anthony O'Connor has been a good signing at the back but his centre back partners were incredible weak, and he had goalkeepers underperforming behind him. I thought the set-up of the team overall was good and we pressed very smartly and efficiently, but every time the opposition got into our final third it was always incredibly dangerous.
Come January, Robinson absolutely sorted those problems out. Got a good keeper in Trevor Carson, a couple of good centre backs and a defensive midfielder to be used when called for. Suddenly, we looked far stronger as a team and even our attacking productivity even improved as well - guessing this was partly due to them having more confidence in our defence. Also helped that our two best attacking midfielders managed to shake off some injury troubles.
Got a couple of great wins in January, and performances continued to be at a high standard into February. Despite results not going our way, a lot of this was due to bad luck, some bizarre circumstances and good goalkeeping/bad finishing. I'd cautiously predict that if Robinson had stayed, results would have started to turn in our favour a bit more often as the performances were there.
So the irony is, he left just as he was beginning to sort things out and find a bit of a groove. Now he appears to be back at square one with St Mirren, albeit with a vastly higher salary! I'd say he is a good manager and worth giving time to, but results have gone to pot particularly drastically which is quite alarming. Not sure he's got much of a leg to stand on if you get relegated - although I'm not sure how likely this is as I'm not too clued up on the teams around you etc.
Oh and an Obika update! He's just been incredibly unfortunate. Got a massive hamstring injury in pre-season which kept him out until the end of December, and then understandably took time to find a bit of mojo again. He's also playing second fiddle to Stockton, who is absolutely undroppable and has been incredible this season with 21 league goals.
