Martindale berates poor defence work

Livingston boss Davie Martindale blamed his ropey rearguard for their third defeat in seven days.

He believed they had the opportunity to take at least a point from Fir Park until their familiar failings came back to bite them.

They were caught over-committing players as they chased the game and conceded a killer third goal to Chris Long on the break.

“I think at 2-1 the momentum had swung our way but you will never win games the way we defended,” he said.

“I don’t think Matej Polatnik had to jump in for the penalty and, at the second goal, we never cleared our lines properly.

“The third one I don’t know why we cleared it to our left – it was Keystone Cops a wee bit.

“Our defending has to be better and, as a squad, the last four or five games haven’t been good enough.”

Martindale took no consolation in the fact they are nailed-on for a top-six finish. “I look at it on a game-by-game basis and the last five haven’t been up to scratch,” he said.

“This is the same group who went 14 games unbeaten with 10 clean sheets and it looks like we would struggle to keep a clean sheet right now.

“The boys have to find that inner confidence and quickly. We need to defend our box better and to do the basics better.

“People talk about three games in seven days but that’s disrespectful to Motherwell. I think I made enough changes to make sure we had enough energy in the midfield areas to get us up the park.

“You look at the scoreline but I don’t think Robby Mccrorie had a lot to do and that’s disappointing when we lost three goals.

“They didn’t have a lot of shots on our goal, we weren’t much better.”

DAVID DICKINSON kept good control of a never less than competitive encounter.