Saturday 22 November 2014 18:45, UK
St Mirren boss Tommy Craig insists he still has the belief that he can turn around his struggling side's fortunes following the 3-0 defeat to Hamilton Accies.
Goals by Tony Andreu, Mickael Antoine-Curier and Ali Crawford barely reflected Hamilton’s dominance, against Craig’s much-changed team.
When questioned on whether he still had confidence that he was the man to haul the Paisley side away from the lower reaches of the Scottish Premiership, Craig said: "Yeah, of course I have.
"I think if we can play the way I know we can we'll be okay - but we're making it harder as games go by.
"I suppose people will want to talk about pressure - but I've got a job to do and I'll be back in on Monday morning ready to go again."
On the game itself, Craig was despondent about the overall performance of his much-changed side.
"I thought the first half was relatively even," said Craig.
"I thought it was a poor game up until half-time. Just before half-time they got the goal and they came out with their tails up and they made it more difficult in the second half.
"In the end they were quite dominant over the piece, so I'm really disappointed with how we played.
"We didn't really get a foothold in the game at any time, or control it at any time, but I don't think they did either in the first half. But the second half they were the better team.
"We threw caution to the wind late on and hit the woodwork and had a couple of chances, but I'm in no way saying that we deserved anything from the game."
Accies boss Alex Neil was delighted to get back to winning ways after picking up just one point in the previous four matches.
And Neil felt the Hamilton display was reminiscent of the team’s play earlier in the campaign.
Neil said: "I think the most pleasing thing for me was the fact that after the second goal, we started to move the ball as well as we had done in the previous 10 or 11 games and got back to what we were renowned for at the start of the season.
"Over the piece I thought we were totally dominant and I thought we deserved to win the game.
"I'm delighted for the lads. They've worked really, really hard and we wanted to turn it round in front of our own fans. It was really pleasing to get another clean sheet.
"The message has been the same since the start, but to maintain that type of form and the type of pressure we apply to people, obviously with such a young group it's going to be difficult at this level.
"But I think we got back to that again today. It's not going to be like that every week, we're going to play well and we're not going to play well. But when we do play well as we showed today, we're a match for anyone."
