We’re lacking hunger, fumes Saints boss
Callum Davidson questioned his St Johnstone players’ hunger after the swell of optimism drawn from victory over Hearts evaporated in the Highlands.
The Saints manager watched in dismay as his team lost their hard-earned firsthalf lead and then disintegrated against a spirited second-half revival by County.
Defeat left the Perth side still only two points above Dundee, who have a game in hand, and seven behind County in the scrap to escape relegation play-off territory.
Davidson said: “They didn’t seem to be hungry enough. That’s maybe a bad accusation to make, because they’ve been good.
“But I think you saw out there we didn’t do enough to stop County’s goals and, on the other side, to go and create and be positive.
“I just want them to be positive. We’re going to have ups and downs as the season goes along.
“There’s five games to the split and we need to start winning.
“I’d rather go down being positive and getting beat, rather than do what we did for the last 30 minutes of the second half.
“For me, the fans were brilliant today and we didn’t give them anything to shout about.
“I don’t know whether it is fragile confidence. I don’t really know the answer to that.
“The second half was a shadow of ourselves and how we’ve been.
“We’ve managed to get a lot of points and this was such a huge game.
“It definitely wasn’t pressure. I just think sometimes when we lose a goal we’re quite fragile.
“I don’t think we responded well at all. “It shouldn’t be fragile after the Hearts victory. Performances have been good. At times we’ve had poor refereeing decisions, but today we couldn’t blame that at all.
“It was only the players out there.” Davidson added: “We saw the confidence of our players in the first half.
“We had a gameplan and I thought we carried it out really well.
“I was really disappointed to lose the goal when we did, later on in the first half.
“I thought we went safe and went into our shell.”