Jimmy Thelin spoke to the media after our defeat at Rugby Park this afternoon:
“Our performance today is not acceptable, not good enough. Kilmarnock play their game really well, they’re good at what they do, they win the second balls, they put in crosses, how they arrive in the box, how they defend. But we have to compete much, much more against them. You can draw games, you can lose games but not in the way we did today. This effort is not good enough.
“You can get in some part of the season a really bad run, this happens. But some of the games where we don’t get the results we want, like Hearts and Hibs away for example, at least we competed. Today, they win every duel, they win every second ball, they win everything. If this happens, it’s not easy to win football games and I’m a part of this as well, I’m the coach and my staff and the players we have we have to look ourselves in the mirror and do much, much better on Sunday away against Dundee United.
“Right now we just need to stick together and come back with a much better effort than we have done now. No one can hide, we have to keep the head high and go out again and compete. There’s no other way, no one else will do it for us, it’s us, me, the staff, the players, we have to stick together and show much more energy and belief.
“I don’t like the word ‘confidence’, you can’t play good one day and then blame confidence if you don’t play so good the next. We have to do our basic things much better than we do today. This is the second game in a row now, how we cover each other, when we lose the first ball we don’t pick up the second ball, this kind of thing we need to stop.
“I don’t like to think ‘Okay we are still in a good position in the table.’ Right now, we have to do much better, we can’t hide behind we have a good start or whatever. Football is not the past, it’s not the future, it’s right now and right now we don’t perform well and we need to find a way to stop this and it starts on Sunday. We can’t show this side of ourselves one more time this season, that’s not good enough.”
