Reynolds: Bin the cliches and nonsense and start to play

Dundee United captain Mark Reynolds believes the time for talking a good game is over following the embarrassment of their 2-0 home defeat by East Fife.

The central defender is fed up of “clichés” and the “same old nonsense” and thinks the Tangerines now have to show on the park that they deserve to be considered Championship promotion contenders.

They suffered a historically bad defeat by the Fifers in the Betfred Cup on Tuesday night, with the Methil men having to go back 47 years for their last competitive win over United and 73 years for their previous success at Tannadice.

It has burst any balloon of optimism that had been flying over the Arabs.

Despite that, a large travelling support will head south to Shrewsbury for today’s friendly against the English League One side – United’s final fixture before the league campaign kicks off next Saturday. Reynolds knows the players have to up their game considerably if they are to get off to a flying start against Inverness in that home opener.

He said: “It takes a long time to build confidence, get the fans back involved and build up momentum.

“A result like that (against East Fife) puts us back to square one. We will need to learn from it.

“It is hard to talk about it because you feel as if you are just throwing clichés out there and repeating the same old nonsense.

“Criticism will come our way but if we want to be at United and be successful, we need to take that in our stride. It is important to learn from it and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“We are at a stage where everybody is wanting us to talk a big game, talk about promotion and keep building ourselves up.

“However, we need to be putting in performances.

“I have had these results before in my career, where they seem to have come out of nowhere.

“But we are a scalp this season and there are very few people want to see us go up and see us do well. Everybody is saying how we are talking the talk, that we did that last season but didn’t live up to it.

“Again, do we deserve to be talking like that? We have stepped up, put our necks on the line and said we are a team that should be going up.”