St Mirren 1 - 3 Motherwell: Murray fears for St Mirren after home setbacks

Published on Sunday 10 May 2009 22:22

HUGH Murray fears St Mirren will be relegated unless they can bring about a dramatic improvement in their play.

The Paisley side are just two points off the bottom of the Clydesdale Bank Premier League table after a 3-1 loss to Motherwell, their second successive damaging home defeat.

The Buddies now face a difficult midweek trip to basement rivals Kilmarnock, followed by next Saturday's crunch visit to bottom side Falkirk.

St Mirren had conceded a late winner at home to Inverness the previous week in the first bottom-six game, and midfielder Murray said: "The last two performances have been nowhere near good enough and if we put in similar performances (in the remaining three games] I've no doubt we'll be relegated. We've had a chance to put a bit of distance between ourselves and Falkirk, but we deserved to be beaten both times and quite frankly, if we continue to play the way we have in the past two games, we're in trouble.

"Our performances had been quite good here right up until the Inverness game and if I knew what was going wrong, I'd love to say – but St Mirren need to start winning games if we want to stay in the Premier League, it's as simple as that. All of the players have to go away and have a really good look at themselves; we now have a massive game on Wednesday and it's a must-win.

"Quite frankly, we didn't deserve anything from this game. Motherwell were better than us all over the park and every player needs to get their sleeves rolled up and fight if we want to stay in the league."

Seventh-placed Motherwell comfortably secured the points thanks to an early headed opener by Jamie Murphy and a double by David Clarkson, before substitute Stephen O'Donnell scored the hosts' late consolation.

Motherwell midfielder Stephen Hughes said: "We were really attacking and that's the way we like to play; we had five players going forward, so it was good that we could go for goals, and that paid off. We played well and it was a great surface for us to go out and play on – it's not what we're used to at Fir Park so to get the ball down and play it about was great."