Stephen Robinson believes Jonah Ayunga is ready to make the step up from sitting in the stands to starring on the pitch.
The powerful striker has spent the last eleven months recovering from a ruptured ACL that cut short his promising first season with St Mirren.
While admitting the 26-year-old will take time to get back up to the kind of speed that saw him net against Celtic and Rangers, Robinson feels the forward will only return to his clinical best by getting back in the thick of the action.
And after months of anxiously watching on from the sidelines, Ayunga could well feature this Saturday afternoon when Livingston visit the SMiSA.
Speaking exclusively to the Paisley Daily Express, Robinson said: “Jonah played 90 minutes last Wednesday in a bounce game and 60 the week before that.
“He’s trained fully now for four weeks and he becomes a serious option now for us.
“I hope he’ll be involved against Livingston. As long as things go the way we hope they do this week, he’ll be involved at some stage - whether that’s from the start or the bench.
“That’s the only way we’ll get him back to being the Jonah we know. Reserve team games don’t replicate first team football in front of a crowd.
“Ultimately he’s got to play first team games to get back to where he was.
“It’s up to me to decide when are the right games to get him back in and manage him.
“We’ve got a lot of games coming up and he won’t be able to play Saturday-Wednesday-Saturday straight away.
“If we think it’s a game we know he can cause defences problems, which is most teams in this league, I know he can give me at least 60 minutes of a game, maybe more.
“He’s worked very hard on his fitness and his strength. We don’t want to put too much pressure on him early because we know it will take him a little while to get up to full speed.
“The only way he’ll do that is by playing football matches.”
Any game time this weekend would represent welcome first minutes for Ayunga since he suffered his serious injury against Motherwell back in January.
Robinson feels the man he brought up from Morecambe will feel like a new signing, with the added bonus that the club already know the kind of decisive performances he can deliver.
Robinson said: “We know what he can do. He’s got a bit of all our centre forwards put together; he can run, he can head and he can finish.
“He is like a new signing for us. People like James Bolton haven’t ever seen him play and then see him in training and are very impressed with him.
“Whether it’s from the bench or from the start, he’s such a good option for us to have now.
“There’s a lot of competition for places up front, which can only be a good thing for us going forward.”
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