Thumbs down
Hamilton Accies captain Darian Mackinnon says his side will pick themselves back up from their crushing defeat at home to Motherwell – because they didn’t ‘chuck it’.
Motherwell ran out comfortable 3-1 winners against ten-man Accies following an opening 23 minutes they would like to forget.
But the fact that they kept going for the 90 minutes tells Daz that they’ll be OK for the visit to Hearts at Tynecastle on Saturday.
Salient points from the game were that Motherwell took the lead in 16 minutes.
Charles Dunne’s low cross into the box was booted over by Sam Stubbs for a corner on the left, with Liam Polworth’s delivery headed off the bar by Peter Hartley.
Hamilton didn’t learn from that, and when Polworth sent in another setpiece from the right, this time Hartley looped a header into the left corner.
It got worse in 21 minutes when Polworth’s cross from the right was headed by Chris Long, and while attempting to clear it, young Jamie Hamilton headed the ball off his own arm, resulting in a red card for the youngster and a penalty, which Liam Donnelly tucked into the bottom right corner.
Hamilton pulled a goal back two minutes later from another penalty after Hartley handled inside the box and Ross Cunningham fired it home for his fifth goal of the season.
But Long went on a run and smashed a shot across Owain Fon-williams and into the left corner in 51 minutes to seal the points.
“I don’t think it will be too difficult to lift the boys from that,” said Mackinnon.
“When we went down to ten men the shape was good, we worked our socks off – you can never fault us for that. Once at Killie we really threw the towel in after a couple of goals, but I think there’s more resilience about this team, we just need to cut out the silly mistakes.
“We could have chucked that and it could have been four, five or six, but we didn’t, we stuck at it on a hot day, and we’ve ran our hearts in, it’s just not been our day.”
Mackinnon added: “We’ve got good players in there, no matter what anybody says about this team. We’ve got quality in Mickel Miller, Marios Ogkmpoe, Lewis Smith, Ross Cunningham, and me, Alex Gogic and Will Collar will hold it together in the middle of the park. Granted, we’ll probably not do anything magic, but we’ll hold the fort for everybody to win the ball back, give it to the better players and say ‘go and do something’.
“That’s a good structure we’ve got just now and we haven’t had that for a while, so we need to keep 11 men on the pitch, keep the same fight and workrate, because that was there.”
Mackinnon is looking for a reaction in Edinburgh on Saturday, and said: “Hearts away is always a good stadium to go and play at. We’ll try to pass the ball and keep our shape. We’ve done that in the last three weeks, and when you go away to the bigger teams that’s a big ‘must.’ Now, can we ask for the next bit; when we keep our shape, can we break on teams?”