NO GOING BACK
McKenzie shudders at memory of Killie’s bad old days... and says they MUST return to winning ways soon
IT may always have been unlikely, perhaps even impossible, for Kilmarnock to continue to breathe the same rarefied air they enjoyed after scaling the dizzy heights under Steve Clarke.
But the prospect of falling off the mountain completely and reverting to being perennial strugglers is something no one at the club can possibly countenance.
At 25, Rory McKenzie still has his best playing days ahead of him. Yet the winger has been around long enough to bear witness to the days when Rugby Park was cast in shadow as well as sunshine.
An emerging talent when fingernails were bitten to the quick as the club survived in the Premiership via a play-off against Falkirk three years ago, the local lad made good could have been forgiven for feeling that the notion of finishing third in the league one day was the stuff of fantasy.
Having seen that come to fruition last year, however, wild horses will not drag him back to the days when the club and their supporters seemed destined to know nothing other than suffering.
‘I wouldn’t say we’re not used to this,’ he said of the underwhelming start to life under Angelo Alessio.
‘It’s been a year, year and a half of success but I don’t want to go back to what it was before.
‘It was going to be very tough to emulate what we did last year.
‘At the end of the season, it was all about starting well — which we’ve not.
‘So we need to regroup and get together and find a way to win. Just be stuffy again, be tough to beat. What we’ve not been in the last couple of weeks.’
The visit of Hamilton today in the Betfred Cup is, in one sense, welcome respite from a league campaign that has thus far not yielded a single point.
But with the humiliation of exiting the Europa League to Welsh part-timers Connah’s Quay Nomads still fresh in the mind, suffering another reverse to the side who defeated them in South Lanarkshire last weekend is surely unthinkable.
‘We’re not daft, the players aren’t daft, the manager’s not daft, you guys aren’t daft,’ added McKenzie. ‘We need to win a game of football.
‘It’s not been a great start but it’s still early doors and now we’re in the League Cup. It takes us away from the league situation. But we still need to win.’
‘It all just comes down to our shape,’ he offered. ‘We’re conceding silly goals, goals on the counter-attack and that just wasn’t us before.
‘Teams coming here last year just didn’t score. We would score and that would often be it. We went on a run of 1-0 games. We just weren’t conceding chances.
‘We went into games knowing if we could keep a clean sheet then there were boys in there who could get the goals. It’s swings and roundabouts — and I don’t think a result is far away.’
While it remains at arm’s length, discord in the dressing room is inevitable. McKenzie would worry if it was currently a case of smiles all round.
‘No matter what changing room I’ve been in, when you lose games of football it’s heated in the dressing room,’ he admitted.
‘That’s normal in any walk of life. We’ve come off the back of a great season and we know how it feels to win games. That’s not been happening and it’s disappointing.
‘We’re also a victim of our own success from last year.
‘Teams used to like coming here, believing it was going to be a walk in the park. But last season it wasn’t. So teams are coming here with more to play for. They know they’re in for a game, so they raise their game.’
There would be a certain irony in Alessio somehow plotting a way to the latter stages of this competition.
Clarke, for all his remarkable success, did not take Kilmarnock to Hampden. Having skipped the group stage this term due to their all-too-brief European involvement, McKenzie feels that could be about to change.
‘I’ve never been to a major final, not even been close,’ he said.
‘Especially now with us not having to go through the group stage format. So we’re closer to a final and we haven’t played a game.
‘We’re two league games in and we’ve got zero points. But there’s 30-odd games left. The only ones panicking are those outside the club, which is causing a bit of a stir. But we’re used to it.’