St Mirren WFC: Hard as Nails
- anchristie89
- Apr 24, 2023
- 2 min read

Reasons I’ve missed work over the years: Bit ill. Bit hungover. Too drunk. Too sober. Too hot, Too cold. Too full of shame. It’s raining. TV was good that night. TV was bad that night. The list is really quite endless. So seeing a footballer play despite carrying an injury has always impressed and horrified me in equal measure. The absolute epitome of this came in early 2020 during a match between St Mirren WFC and Inverness Caley Thistle WFC. Saints captain Jane O’Toole comes off the worst in a fairly innocuous 50/50 and suffers a dislocated knee. Game over for her, surely. I mean, it’s game over for me and I’m only watching from home. Our Jane has other ideas, however. Looking at her knee with the same “well, this has happened” look of inconvenience usually reserved for your Wi-Fi cutting out rather than your LITERAL KNEECAP being six inches to the side of where doctors generally agree it should be, she starts to batter the side of her leg with her fist, punching the dislocated joint back into place so she can continue the game.
Look, it’s not that I’ve never cared about any jobs I’ve had or anything. Rest assured though, if one of my limbs pops out of its socket mid-shift I’m taking at least six months off to lie down about it, so needless to say watching the St Mirren skipper Fonzie her own kneecap back to life is something else.
Gaining a psychological edge over the opposition is an important skill. The Roy Keane stare, the Crazy Gang’s “Yidaho” chant, Bruce Grobbelaar wiggling around on his line before a penalty. All pretty effective mind games when deployed correctly. You really have to concede, however, that seeing your opponent performing field surgery on themselves mid-match probably hands them the advantage to the extent that they might as well be awarded the three points immediately. Absolute nails.
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