Look North: Consistent Saints can hold their own at Tynecastle

PROUD Scot (@chrisgraham79) pinpoints his best bet from the weekend Scottish Premiership action.

Hearts v St Johnstone| Saturday 26th January 2019, 15:00

It’s been a miserable few months for Hearts. Back on October 23rd they beat Dundee 3-0 to move six points clear at the top of the table. Craig Levein’s side had picked up 25 points from a possible 30 and were touching single figure odds for the title.

Since then they played another 12 Premiership matches but have picked up just 11 more points. That’s a points per game ratio of 0.91 compared to 2.5 after the game at Dens Park.

Costly injuries

Injuries have been the main cause of this big drop off in form. Steven Naismith, Uche Ikpeazu and John Souttar were all high-profile injury absentees that knocked the stuffing out of Hearts towards the end of 2018.

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Naismith and Souttar (just) have returned since but the heady days of autumn are long gone. The Tynecastle outfit slumped to a disappointing 2-1 home defeat to bottom side Dundee as the league resumed on Wednesday night. Hearts dropped to sixth in the table, their lowest position of the season so far.

On top of the bad result, there was bad vibes. Levein laid into new signing David Vanecek describing him as “rubbish” as he was substituted after just 34 minutes and the Hearts boss on Friday went on the attack against TV pundit Michael Stewart. Levein seems rattled.

Super Saints

On Saturday they host super St Johnstone. Saints have been the model of consistency this campaign and deserve a whole lot of praise. They’ve overtaken Hearts in the table despite a 14 point gap between the sides in October. There’s so much to like about Tommy Wright’s side.

Since a 6-0 humbling to Celtic in October, Saints have won nine of their following 13 league matches. Victims have included Aberdeen and Hibs and they held both Kilmarnock and Saturday’s opponents Hearts within that spell.

The Perth side have won their last four matches, haven’t conceded a goal in over a month and have re-signed club hero Michael O’Halloran. There’s a good feel about the place.

St Johnstone look in much better shape than Hearts at the moment and they look overpriced at 3/1 to win on Saturday. I’m happy to back them with a +0.5 start at 9/10 with 188BET.