Hamilton expect a ‘different’ Motherwell side

Accies travel the six miles to their near neighbours hoping to kick-start their season under new player/manager Canning.

Alex Neil’s successor is still waiting for his first win as boss despite having had 10 attempts since being appointed in January.

Canning admits that run has emptied his side’s confidence reserves. Ordinarily the 33-year-old would sit his men down in front of the TV and make them watch repeat performances of their last two victories over the Steelmen – September’s 4-0 triumph and a 5-0 drubbing on New Year’s Day – in order to raise their spirits.

But, with Well boss Ian Baraclough having signed eight new players since their last meeting, Canning is not sure his team could learn anything from those games.

He said: “Before we play an opponent, we will watch their last three games and see what we can learn from it.

“At times, we will watch back games of our own as well – it’s something we have done from time to time.

“However, for me the past is the past. You can look back on things too much – you need to look to the future.

“I can speak to the boys about the 5-0 game and the 4-0 game and we will all know we are capable of beating Motherwell.

“But their personnel has changed a lot since we last played them so there might not be too many lessons from those games.

“We have our scouts go watch them obviously and we will hopefully have a good idea of how they will play, the system they will use and how they will line up. But we can’t really look too much at the past results because it’s now a different team we are playing.”