Kilmarnock and St. Johnstone share four goals at Rugby Park
Kilmarnock and St. Johnstone drew 2-2 at Rugby Park on MatchDay 12, with Joel Cotterill's goal after 65 minutes settling the final score.
By Harvey Watkins,
Kilmarnock and St. Johnstone drew 2-2 at Rugby Park on Saturday afternoon, a result that kept up the habit of goals between these two sides. Four were scored, three of them before half-time, and the last of them, from Joel Cotterill on 65 minutes, brought the scores level and proved to be the final word.
How the goals came
Cathal McCarthy opened the scoring after a quarter of an hour. That was the only goal of the opening half-hour, and for a while it looked as though the afternoon might be a tighter affair than August's meeting between the clubs.
The game changed shape in the space of a minute just before the interval. Danny Schmidt scored on 40 minutes and Djenairo Daniels added another on 41. The sides went in with three goals already on the board and one of them holding a 2-1 lead.
Two goals in consecutive minutes is unusual in any match. Whatever the order of the exchanges in that spell, it meant the first half finished with the contest open rather than settled, and it left the side behind with a full 45 minutes to find a reply.
Cotterill levels it
That reply came 20 minutes into the second half. Cotterill's goal made it 2-2, and from there neither team found a way through again. The final 25 minutes produced no further scoring, which, given how freely the goals had come either side of the break, made for a quieter end than the first 65 minutes suggested.
The second half as a whole was far more economical than the first: one goal against three. It was enough to change the result, though, turning what had been a narrow lead at the break into a share of the points.
A pattern from August
The previous meeting between the clubs, on 2 August, ended St. Johnstone 4-3 Kilmarnock. Taken together, the two most recent fixtures have produced 11 goals, and neither has been decided by more than a single goal.
Two matches are a small sample, and it would be stretching things to call this a settled trend. What can be said is that neither meeting has been a low-scoring affair, and that St. Johnstone have come away without defeat in both. Kilmarnock, on home soil this time, turned a one-goal loss into a draw.
What it adds up to
A 2-2 draw on MatchDay 12 does not tell us a great deal on its own. The more useful observation is the consistency of the meetings: close scorelines, plenty of goals and, in Saturday's case, a burst of scoring before the interval that shaped everything that followed.
On the evidence of these two games, the next encounter between Kilmarnock and St. Johnstone would be a reasonable place to expect goals, though two results are not enough to treat that as anything firmer than a view.