St Johnstone v Motherwell: Askou dreams of cup final place, but faces tough tie in Perth

St Johnstone knocked Motherwell out of the Scottish Cup in January

Motherwell boss Jens Berthel Askou has targeted a Premier Sports Cup final slot – but knows he faces a tough tie at St Johnstone first.

The Lanarkshire side are looking to progress to the quarter-final when they come up against the Perth side at McDiarmid Park this afternoon.

St Johnstone are riding high at the top of the Championship with a 100 per cent start to their league campaign, and, bossed by former Fir Park hero Simo Valakari, knocked Motherwell out of the Scottish Cup fourth round at the same venue in January.

Askou isn’t expecting an easy time of it, but hopes his side can go one better than last season, when they bowed out to Rangers in the Premier Sports Cup semi-final.

The Dane said: “I’ve heard good things about [Valakari], I hear he has a history here as well, so he’s a popular guy in both camps, and I look forward to meeting him and seeing his team perform.

“But hopefully we will have the upper hand and progress, and move on. We have a good history here, especially recently, of doing well in the League Cup, and we want to see how far we can take it.

“If everything goes well, maybe we could do even better than we did last year, so it’s a massive game for us.

“We know a little bit about St Johnstone, we played them last year, we have a player in Liam Gordon who has been there.

“We’ve studied and followed them closely. It’s a team that is very confident at the moment, they’re doing really well, they have a similar approach to the way the play the game as we do, and they’ve had some great results over the summer.

“It’s a team that if we’re not at our best they will hurt us, that’s for sure, so we approach the game with the utmost respect for them.

“They’re a great team, they’re at home, and we know we will have to produce our very best quality to be able to progress and win the game.

“I expect it to be a difficult game, just as difficult as the ones we’ve had in the last couple of weeks, but I also sense that we are having a great support with us, with about 1000 tickets sold already, so that shows we have the backing we would wish for, right now.

“We will do our very best to live up to that.”

Motherwell have been given bad news that striker Eseosa Sule is out for seven months.

However, there was better news on some of their other injured stars.

Askou said: “Apostolos Stamatelopoulos had a little issue when he came off [against Rangers] that we had to address in the beginning of last week, which is why we decided to leave him out of the starting line-up at St Mirren. It was a volume matter, so we had to bring him on later in the game.

“He’s fine now, he’s good and ready.

“Johnny Koutroumbis and Liam Gordon had some minor issues, they’re not ready for Saturday, but we will assess it early next week and see how far it is.

“Jordan McGhee is back in full training next week, which is really positive, so we look forward to getting him back on the pitch with us.

“Eseosa has had surgery, a bigger injury, a muscle injury, and now he will be out for seven months, unfortunately.

“The surgery has gone well and we hope for a speedy recovery.”