“I thought the performance was more like us.

“It’s the type of home performance that has been good enough to win games over the last couple of years and I thought we were good enough up until Motherwell equalised. Once we got the first goal we created a few chances in the second half and there was a lot of pace and incisiveness to our performance.

“It’s a big improvement on where we have been the last couple of weeks but having said that you have got to get the second goal and knock the stuffing out of the opposition. It was important that we tried to get the second goal and we reminded the players at half-time that we didn’t want it to just be a case of stumbling over the line. We had to keep our discipline and shape but try and take advantage of them gambling.

“Credit to Mark (McGhee) for his substitutions, he changed his forwards round but I think there was an over eagerness from them at times to get the equaliser which gave us opportunities to pick them off. “We felt that Reynolds goal should have stood, for me he was onside so we didn’t get the break with that but we didn’t make the most of our opportunities and we lost a poor goal which is something that we have seen over the last few weeks.

“When I said that there was a familiarity about the performance, normally we would have won that game 1-0 and been ruing the missed chances to make it 2 and 3 but we still had a job to do there to meet our responsibilities to see the game off and it was far too cheap a goal for us to concede.

“At 1-1 it was the total reverse as we became over eager to score a winner and it was Motherwell who could have won the game because our keeper pulled off two or three good saves. They will be disappointed that they never made more of those chances but in the main I thought we were the better team and the more dominant team.

“We got into positions to score. All of our front four had opportunities to get the second goal and it was good to see them backing themselves in those areas. For me there are some real positives to take from the game and it’s a big improvement in performance from the last few weeks.

“I think next Saturday was always going to be a good game anyway but ideally we wanted to go back to the top of the league tonight. We haven’t managed to do that but it represents a real opportunity for us to get back to winning ways in probably the most difficult fixture that you can face in the season.

“We have beaten them there before and we beat them a few weeks ago with a strong performance and it will take something similar to that to give us a chance. We take the positives from today and we look forward to that one.”