There is no doubt, as Stephen Robinson says, that everyone at St Mirren would have taken being in fifth place in the Premiership at the halfway stage had it been offered to them in the summer. And inarguably, if they remain there come May, that will represent a successful season.

But the Saints manager isn’t one for resting on his laurels, and having navigated a difficult festive period on the whole with their top-six status still intact, he doesn’t want to settle on remaining there as the limit of his ambition.

To move the club onto the next level though, Robinson recognises that the Saints will need a strong transfer window as they look to bolster certain areas of their team, and that is where his focus has immediately shifted in these early days of the winter shutdown.

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“We need to refresh ourselves and get new bodies in,” Robinson said.

“There's not loads wrong - we are sitting fifth in the table after a year where we finished in the top six.

“There's a lot of good stuff, a lot of positives, it's now up to me to try and keep that going and sign players that I owe to the current players to give them another boost and a kick-on. We are going to have to do a little bit of wheeling and dealing to do that.

“Everybody would have [taken our current position at the start of the season], of course. But now we are here, when you get something in life you get used to it, and we want more of it. That's the challenge, to give that.

“People were talking about Europe and a couple of people were talking about breaking the top two up and things like that earlier in the season.

“If we can remain a top six side, that's a huge goal for us. And you can start to establish yourself, you can start attracting more players and moving forward. That's our aim, that's our challenge, to try and repeat what we did last season, and we are on course to do that.

“But when you have had a taste of stuff and gone unbeaten and you taste a few defeats, it's harder to take for everybody.”

The reality of St Mirren’s financial station though means that Robinson will have to evacuate to accumulate when it comes to January signings.

“Certainly, there will have to be people going out for me to strengthen,” he said.

“There's not a bottomless pit to go and invest in the squad. We need to move people out and it's up to me to do that.

“That's the hard bit of football because sometimes, through nobody's fault, you need to create some funds to strengthen areas we are weak in. We need to do that, and we are going to spend the whole of January trying to do that.

“We have already got plenty of targets. Attracting them and getting them up to Scottish football is quite difficult at times, but we are working on it.”

While there will be departures from Paisley in the coming days and weeks, then, Robinson is confident that those will be players of his choosing, rather than fearing the prospect of any bigger clubs swooping in for his key assets.

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Given what he is trying to build at the club, and how the board have so far supported those aims to the hilt, he said it would take funny money for any of his mainstays to be allowed to leave.

“Unless it's a ridiculous offer, and then it becomes a financial decision for the football club, which I totally understand, the board are in no rush to sell anybody,” he said.

“It will have to be at a very good price, and we must have a replacement for them.

“Our challenge is, for the resources we have, we have got a very good starting XI. We don't pay them particularly well but to replace them on that level of resource is very, very difficult.

“To strengthen your starting XI is very difficult but if we can overall enhance our squad and add a little bit of freshness, it's been a very, very good year and we have to try and kick on.

“I'm confident the group of boys we have that we want to keep at the football club, will still be here.”