Jagsbossout toendstreak

EK Thistle boss Aaron Connolly says his side are determined to put three heavy defeats on the bounce behind them when they head to struggling Carluke Rovers this weekend.

The Jags were sidelined on Saturday after their home clash with Vale of

Clyde in the West of Scotland Third Division was beaten by the weather.

It means they need to wait a bit longer to get over a run of results that has seen them ship 17 goals in their last three outings, following a 6-3 loss at Ardrossan, a 7-0 hiding at home to Lanark and a 4-1 defeat at port Glasgow in their last fixture on February 11.

Connolly believes his side, who sit ninth in the table, should be confident of beating 16th-place Rovers and hopes they’ve had their blip.

He said:“There’s no shying away that we’ve got some very difficult results to try and overcome so that it was disappointing not to play on Saturday, but we got the boys in for training and I watched Carluke at Vale of Leven to prepare for this weekend.

“We were missing a couple of players through illness so it might have been a bit of a blessing in disguise for us anyway.

“We’ve got to go into games like this wanting to win them. Teams can beat each other in this league but I would never label ourselves as favourites for this game.

“We want to win in and that will be the expectation for us, but we have to think about performing in the right way. We want to play our style, impose ourselves on the game and if we do that to the best of our abilities, I’ve no doubt results will take care of themselves.”

Connolly says he still takes heart from the Port Glasgow clash and insists the scoreline wasn’t a fair reflection on his side’s display.

He added:“I’ve always maintained the performances are more important to me than results at this stage – and the performance at Port was very good.

“We were unfortunate to lose that, let alone lose it so heavily, but there’s just moments in games where we weren’t clinical. I have also said to the group that even though there has been so much change and upheaval in the squad recently, we were always going to come unstuck eventually.

“We’ve had a decent run of results from October to December so I expected us to have a blip – just not conceding as many goals as we have.

“We are more than halfway through the season now but it doesn’t feel like that for a lot of the players because a lot of them are fairly new.

“Now it’s about putting these past three games to bed and kicking on for the rest of the season.”