Accies' James McArthur disapointed by team's performance against St Johnstone

Oct 8 2009 by Andrew McGilvray, Hamilton Advertiser

STAND-IN captain James McArthur admits he was mystified by Hamilton’s poor performance against St Johnstone – just a week after nearly taking a draw from Hearts at Tynecastle.

But the midfield ace said Accies need to get it right quickly or they’re going to face serious problems.

McArthur said: “That was a game we had to win, or at least take a point from. The defeat means St Johnstone are three points ahead of us now and that’s very disappointing.

“I just don’t think we got going, and we’re lacking that creativity in the box. Marco Paixao had a few shots that were very unlucky, but apart from that I don’t think we caused them too many problems.

“We didn’t compete well enough, we need to win more battles, more flick-ons – everything was wrong on Saturday and it was just a poor, poor performance from us.”

James admits he’s glad of the international break this weekend as it allows injured players to get closer to fitness, but he said Hamilton won’t have a free week.

He said: “We’ll be in most days and working hard to try and improve. We have been working hard in training, but we have to make sure we carry that through to the Saturday, and it was very disappointing that we didn’t.

“We don’t become a bad team overnight and Saturday was maybe just a bad day at the office, but we need to start picking up more points.

“This season, if I’m being honest, I think we’ve been disappointing.

“We’ve been stop-start and we have to try and get into a rhythm where we’re going to go on a run and start to pick up some points.

“We haven’t played anywhere near as well as we did last year and we’ve lost a lot of players, but we’ve got guys in and we all need to step up to the mark.”

McArthur says Hamilton will be working hard to ensure they’re better prepared for a tough double-header against Dundee United and Celtic following the international break.

Accies travel to Tannadice on October 17, before entertaining Tony Mowbray’s side eight days later.

And James said: “It’s a massive game against United and then we’ve got Celtic at home. That put even more pressure on Saturday’s performance because we wanted to get a result going into those games, but we’ll be ready to go by the time they come around.”