Tony Gallacher urging relegation-battling Saints to make most of home advantage

Port Vale v Liverpool U21 – Papa John’s Trophy – Northern Group D – Vale Park
(Image credit: Nick Potts)

Tony Gallacher wants St Johnstone to take advantage of back-to-back home games to help alleviate relegation concerns.

With three games remaining before the split, the Perth club are second bottom of the cinch Premiership, one point ahead of Dundee .

The first of those two matches at McDiarmid Park are against Motherwell  on Saturday and then Livingston  after the international break. They then travel to leaders Celtic before the league breaks into top half and bottom half with five fixtures thereafter.

Defender Gallacher, 22, who signed from Liverpool in January after joining the English giants from Falkirk in 2018, said: “If we can do the business and get points going into those last six games it will be massive for momentum going forward.

“So all thoughts are on three points on Saturday and games coming up.

“We are all in this together. We can’t get our heads down, there are still a lot of points available for us to pick up.

“Everyone is sticking together, making sure we are a team unit.

“We know the situation we are in, so it is a game at a time, keeping ourselves that point or two or even go further away as possible from Dundee as we can and start pushing up.

“Eight games remaining, a lot of points to pick up. If you get one or two wins, you don’t know where you can end up.”

Gallacher has enjoyed the start to his St Johnstone career and admits his departure from Liverpool was overdue after failing to make the breakthrough at first-team level.

He said: “It has been good. I feel as though the time has flown by. The boys and the coaching staff, everyone has been great

“It has obviously been a massive change coming from Liverpool to here but I have enjoyed every second of it, the home fans, even the away fans, getting that exposure again has been good so it has been a good start.

“Obviously it is hard leaving such a massive club but for myself, it was overdue.

“At the point I was at in my career, it wasn’t difficult for me.

“It didn’t really work out for myself but not a lot of people can say they have done that in their career so I am proud of what I done and what Liverpool gave me the chance to do.

“But turning 23 in July, I knew I needed to build a platform for myself and I knew this would be a good decision.”

Gallacher brings with him “professionalism on and off the park” from his time at Anfield.

He said: “Any time we trained with the first team, no one was slacking around, waiting for the game to come round, it was 100 per cent at it constantly and off the park, you make sure you are doing all the right things, eating the right things, making sure you recover well.

“That professionalism and experience of what you can do off the pitch will help a lot.”