Inverness Caledonian Thistle have been embarrassing and should forget any chance of reaching promotion play-offs says Scott Allardice
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SCOTT Allardice has branded Caley Thistle’s current form “embarrassing” and told team-mates to forget talk of reaching the promotion play-offs.
In a scathing assessment of recent failings, the young midfielder insisted his team’s only focus, now, should be on escaping relegation danger.
Tuesday night’s surprise defeat at home to fellow strugglers Morton made it just one win in 12 games for Caley Jags.
A team that started the season with high ambitions of challenging Hearts for the title has now slipped perilously into the ninth-place relegation play-off position.
With manager John Robertson on compassionate leave and assistant Scott Kellacher recuperating from serious illness, it has fallen to caretaker Neil McCann to plot a recovery.
But former Dundee United youth Allardice lays blame for the current slump in fortune squarely at the players’ feet.
The 22-year-old said: “We should forget any thoughts of the promotion play-offs, whatsoever. We’re in a relegation battle, plain and simple.
“We need to get ourselves out of this. We’re deluded if we’re thinking we’re going anywhere other than a relegation fight.
“The performances are just not good enough. It is one win in 12. It’s embarrassing.”
Allardice knows some view Caley Thistle, with a past Premiership pedigree, as too big a club to seriously contemplate a drop to League One.
But he stressed: “Partick were relegated last season and Hearts going down from the Premiership was exactly the same.
“No club has a given right to stay in the Championship. We’re kidding ourselves if we don’t realise that.
“We have one big push ahead of us to stay in this league.
“From myself and everyone else, it just isn’t good enough right now.
“We’ve seen this season we can play some nice stuff, but if you’re not sticking the ball in the net and you’re conceding horrendous goals every week, you get what you deserve.
“We are where we are, through no fault of anybody but ourselves. We can’t say ‘we’re better than that’ or ‘we’ll be okay’.
“Maybe that’s the problem - we think we’re better than where we are at the moment.
“The table doesn’t lie. We can say we’re good players but we’re not showing it.
“We need to stick together as a team and grind it out like we did in a horrendous game down at Ayr last month.
“That’s what we need because we’re right in amongst it now.”
Analysing Tuesday evening’s disappointment, Allardice added: “It was the same old story, but the worrying thing was we didn’t create many chances.
“The problem this season has mostly been creating chances but not taking them.
“The goal we concede is a carbon copy - almost every game we concede one like that.
“We have to learn.
“In the first five or 10 minutes of the second half, Morton were just lumping it forward and we were recycling it. It looked like gaps were starting to open up.
“Then we concede a goal and they put 10 men behind the ball.
“We just don’t seem good enough to break teams down, it is as simple as that.
“We have to take a step back and look at ourselves because this is relegation form.”
