Haining all ready for take-off

The St Mirren defender believes his team's fortunes against the Old Firm are due to take a turn for the better, as Moira Gordon discovers

FIRST GAME of the season and St Mirren's Will Haining is walking towards the away dressing room with just 61 minutes played. Red-carded, anger burns inside him but it's nothing compared with the sense of injustice harboured by his manager. That only intensifies when Barry Robson nets the resultant penalty and Celtic go on to win 1-0.

Several games have passed since then but views on the matter haven't softened. "It was a bad decision but you get them in football and there's no point in dwelling on them too much," says the defender, who turned 26 on Thursday. "It's still annoying and frustrating but there's nothing I can do about it now. Referees tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the attacker, and that's especially the case when you are playing the Old Firm. That game was at Parkhead and there were 60,000 people shouting 'send him off' or screaming for a penalty. That is to be expected but you are always going to have to make tackles and whether it is called right or not isn't up to the players."

That opening-day red card was a blow to Haining, who played the majority of games in a confidence-building debut season for the Paisley club. It sidelined him for the next match against Kilmarnock and since then he has been stop-start, with niggling injuries hampering him further. He expects to be able to put that behind him against Rangers this afternoon. Despite a couple of near things against Celtic, Rangers have proved more troublesome to St Mirren. Last season they failed to get a goal, let alone get close to a share of the spoils. This afternoon is their first meeting of the current campaign.

"I don't mind playing against the Old Firm, it's just a game of football but it is a glamour game. We will have a full house which doesn't happen all that often and it's just a good game to be involved in but we haven't actually beaten them since I've been here, so I don't enjoy that part of it, but hopefully that will now change.

"It's good to play against them and take in the atmosphere and hopefully we will get a result against them. Last season we went to Parkhead and drew there and were drawing 0-0 with Celtic here last season but, again, there was a dodgy decision to award a free-kick and, to be fair to them, it was a great free-kick and they scored. But that was nearly another result so we have the belief we can do it."

To do so against Rangers, though, will require a significant turnaround. While Celtic have found it tougher, Rangers romped to three wins out of three against Haining and Co last season, scoring nine, conceding none. The fact there are so many attacking options open to Walter Smith makes it even more pesky when it comes to preparing.

"They have all got their pluses. Look at (Kris] Boyd's goals-to-games ratio and it's unbelievable and sometimes you wonder why he's not playing. See his goal against Partick Thistle for instance – what a goal that was – and you know that nine times out of 10 a player would hit that and it would go anywhere but he does it and nine times out of 10 it hits the target. When it comes to finishing there's not many better than him and then Kenny Miller does a lot of running and hard work for the team. Now he is adding goals to his game as well. But we don't even know if they will play – it could be Jean-Claude Darcheville or Nacho Novo and we won't know until the teamsheet arrives in the dressing room.

"Regardless which half of the Old Firm, the fact is the quality they have in their starting XI, on the bench and players who are not even involved, is far superior to what we have got or what other teams in the SPL have got so we know it's going to be difficult but if we all stick together it is possible."

He failed to adhere to that maxim last term, receiving his marching orders as his side went down 4-0 at Ibrox. Yet another disputed yellow card against Darcheville, but this time it was compounded by a challenge on Alan Hutton. "I think the first booking was harsh, the second wasn't. It was my poor decision to slide in for that one so it was stupidity on my part. I took the fine for that one!"

Haining confesses that a move to the SPL has been a step up from life at Oldham. There the game was just as physical but individual errors often went unpunished. Up here there is rarely that let-off and mistakes cost points.

But he doesn't regret heading south when he was offered the chance as a teenager. It was there he met his glamour model wife, Michelle Marsh. She lived round the corner from the family who housed him as a 16-year-old. They married last year.

Over the past few weeks he has been left holding the baby – 10-month-old daughter Maddison – as his wife competes in the ITV2 reality show CelebAir, where celebrities are being trained as cabin crew. With St Mirren plugged at the bottom of the league table, some take-off tips would come in handy.