St Johnstone manager Steve Lomas has described the last fortnight as a ”nightmare”.
”I know people will read this and say ‘there he goes making excuses’ but the facts are we’ve had six regular starters out of the team recently. There’s not a side in the country, except Celtic, who could cope with that level of change.”
Lomas is confident that he’ll get the responses he’s looking for in Glasgow.
He added: ”This is a great bunch of lads and they will bounce back because they are desperate to succeed for this club. Nobody wants to let the season just peter out. I’m sure we will compete a lot better than we did against Motherwell.
”We have decisions to make over team selection. We’ll see who we have and then make our minds up. With Hearts on Sunday we have a bit of a dilemma because that’s a massive game for us. So we’ll have a lot to think about.”
Cillian Sheridan, Callum Davidson and Chris Millar could all be available.
Davidson admitted he’s desperate to help Saints claim their place in Europe.
The defender, back at training on Monday, was sidelined with a groin strain since the win over St Mirren last month. But he’s determined to play a part before the season’s end.
He said: ”It would be huge for us to make Europe. We have been up there most of the season so it has been frustrating to suffer injuries and suspensions at this stage.
”My own injury has dragged on. Two weeks ago I was back in full training and played a reserve game.
”That was probably a mistake in hindsight. But hamstrings can be the most difficult injuries to gauge and even at my age you can be too keen to get back. I probably jumped back in too quickly. You never learn.
”It will be Wednesday before we make a decision on the Celtic game. It is massive but the Hearts game on Sunday would be even bigger for us.”
The Perth boss has had to do without six first-team regulars for each of his first two post-split fixtures. The end result has been back-to-back defeats, the most recent of which was a 5-1 hammering at Motherwell.
Lomas insisted the only team in Scotland who could have coped with their drop-out rate is the one they’re about to face on Thursday Celtic.
Taking the mitigating factors for their two losses out of the equation, however, he has warned his players that the rout at Motherwell will pale into insignificance compared to what could happen against the runaway champions if their form doesn’t improve.
He said: ”We were rubbish against Motherwell and need to improve on that, especially going to Celtic, because if we play like that again they’ll score double figures.
”There’s a huge sense of disappointment and that’s what you’d expect after a 5-1 defeat. It is my job to look at it and assess it.
”The first thing I have to say is that the players have been brilliant, they have still over-achieved this season. Secondly, we have just had issue after issue this last two weeks a total nightmare.
”It has been unbelievable. If it keeps up like this I think I’ll end up going grey although that might not be a bad thing!
”We have had to chop and change, we’ve had suspensions, we’ve not been able to train properly and we’ve had to shuffle players about the side. We have had players phone in sick and guys pull out in the warm-up. It has been never-ending.
”There have been more problems and uncertainty in the last fortnight than I’ve had in the past five months in the job.
Continued…