Ayr draw felt like a defeat, says Rankin
AYR UNITED ........................................... 1 HAMILTON ACCIES ............................... 1 Hamilton assistant John Rankin says their 1-1 draw at Ayr United in the Championship on Friday night felt like a defeat.
Andy Winter’s sixth-minute strike had Accies looking like they were heading for a third successive league win, which would have left them two points behind fifth-placed Raith Rovers, and four adrift of Partick Thistle in fourth.
However, the draw left them sixth, four points behind Rovers, ahead of their trip to Dunfermline last night (Wednesday).
Rankin, who was deputising for selfisolating boss Stuart Taylor, admitted it was a missed opportunity, and felt they should have seen the game out.
He said: “That feels like a defeat, that’s probably the best way to explain it.
“You get to that stage in the game, you’re 1-0 up and I don’t even think there was 20 seconds left on the clock, and let’s be honest, it’s a wonder-strike it’s in the net almost before it has left his foot, there was that much power on it.
“It was a great strike and sometimes you have to hold your hands up and say you’ve lost points to a world-class strike.
“My thinking, can we prevent it from getting to that stage in the first place? There’s got to be something somewhere.
“There’s definitely something that we can stop for the ball to get there, and that has to be our outlook on it - how do we stop it from getting to our final third and allowing them the opportunity to get a shot at goal.”
Hamilton had chances to stretch their lead, with Andy Ryan and David Moyo in particular going close, and Rankin admits they have to make more of those.
“From the way we played in the first half, the chances that we had, I thought we maybe could have been 2-0 up at half-time,” he said. “If we went 2-0 up at half-time, with the way we’ve been playing recently, I think we see the game out.
“But you always give teams an opportunity when it’s only 1-0, and it just shows that we need to be ruthless and take our chances when we get them.
“I thought in the first half we were really good, attacking-wise, caused them lots of problems.
“In the second half we’re talking about the defensive side of it because I don’t think we attacked enough, I don’t think we caused them any problems in the second half, and that’s probably the biggest disappointment.”
Rankin admits winning the game would have put Hamilton in a good position, but need to keep going.
He said: “You just need to win your next game, and we’ve been doing that.
“On Friday night, going into the last minute of the game, we’re thinking we’ve done well, can we keep the clean sheet, can we continue to put pressure on the teams above us, but we’ve lost the goal.
“Aye, we’re disappointed, but we’ll get our heads back up and ready to go.
“We play Arbroath next week and hopefully we take three points from that.”