Barry Robson heaped praise on Raith Rovers for sealing a ‘deserved point’ against Livingston in the ‘hardest’ away day in the Championship.
The Stark’s Park men dug deep to withstand late pressure from the Lions to recover from Saturday’s shock 4-0 hammering at home to Queen’s Park.
They did so with a defence that continually changed through a physical 90 minutes due to injuries and substitutions.
And Robson insists the Kirkcaldy men could have snatched all three points when Finlay Pollock failed to take a one-on-one opportunity in the second-half.
“I think we kind of limited Livingston in the first-half,” said Robson, who also felt Jamie Gullan should have reached a fantastic cross from Pollock in the third minute.
“And then in the last 20 minutes when you’ve got a team like Livingston who’s going for the league, then you know the pressure’s coming.
“You know that they’re going to try and get balls in the box. We knew that would come as well.
“But I thought structurally we were very good. We kept a clean sheet, and we had probably the two best chances in the game.
“If you think of Jamie Gullan’s chance in the first three minutes of the game, he’s got to score.
Robson: ‘Raith deserved point’
“And then Finlay Pollock’s through one-on-one.
“What I said to the players was, ‘if you eradicate the mistakes, we will win games because we create chances’. We’re a dangerous team.
“So, when we got a clean sheet, it’s like, okay, we never got to the goals at the other end, but that’s fine if you keep a clean sheet. You get a point.
“This is the hardest place to come in this division. It’s really difficult, but I thought we handled it really well and we deserved a point.
“And we might have nicked it; we had two really good chances.”
The negative on a night when Raith moved back into fifth and to within four points of Partick Thistle in fourth was an early injury to skipper Scott Brown.
The midfielder had to be replaced after just ten minutes with what looked like a recurrence of the calf problems that have plagued him this season.
“I think it was his calf, but we’ll just have to wait and see,” added Robson. “That’s another accumulation of games catching up.”
Robson also cleared up 37-year-old Lewis Stevenson’s substitution midway through the second-half.
“We were just thinking of Lewis’ age,” he explained. “He’s played all those games. So it was fatigue, and just to give him a bit of a breather as well.”
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