Derek McInnes has confessed his struggling Kilmarnock side have become ‘too easy’ to play against after shipping five second half goals in last night’s 6-0 loss to Rangers at Ibrox.
James Tavernier opened the scoring just before the half-time interval as he ghosted beyond Oliver Bainbridge to fire home at the back post.
The visitors were cut open with ease in the second half, though, as Danilo tapped home from close range before Hamza Igamane fizzed the ball beyond Robby McCrorie from 25 yards moments later.
Nicolas Raskin then waltzed through the defence before teeing up Vaclav Cerny for no.4 with substitute Cyriel Dessers adding a brace to round out a terrible evening for the Ayrshire men.
Killie head into Saturday’s trip to Dundee United sitting just a point above the relegation play-off place while they’ve shipped a league worst 33 goals in 15 games.
Afterwards a dejected McInnes said: “I do think Stuart Findlay is a massive loss for us, but we can’t harp on about that. We have to deal with what we have to deal with.
“We’ve always tried to go quite positive to get the benefit of playing with two wide players and two strikers, and in the main we’ve tried to do that.
“There is a trade-off with that when you come up against teams that play a bit more direct or the better teams, you have to them be able to cope with defending man-for-man a lot of the time.
“Unfortunately for us we’ve not done it with the same confidence or aggressive manner to try and stop your opponent playing and getting opportunities. I think we’ve become just a wee bit too easy to play against.
“The balance of home games to away games has been quite pivotal and we need to start being a team that can cope away from home, and get back to being a winning team at home again.”
The boss confessed it was a ‘horrible’ night but also insisted there’s no room for wallowing as they look to quickly bounce back at Tannadice on Saturday.
He commented: “I thought in the first half in general we competed well enough. Rangers were the better team throughout, of course they were, but there was a wee bit of determination about us, a shape about us, that allowed us to stay in the game.
“We lose a goal and you’re praying for VAR to give you a hand but I had a feeling Tavernier had timed his run. Ultimately it comes down to a throw-in, we don’t do enough to stop a cross and just allow Hagi to put the ball in the box and Tavernier has more determination to get on the end of it.
“Joe Wright going off didn’t really help because we’re already a couple of defenders down, it was a wee bit of a patchwork back-four. We decided at half-time to try and go 4-4-2 and try and get our two centre-halves to go in tight – but it became pretty obvious we couldn’t cope with that.
“It’s such a horrible night for us, it shows what can happen if you don’t keep your determination and you don’t keep your concentration, keep your heads. A horrible night for us, not acceptable to lose in that type of manner.
“We now need to try and get back to being the team we were. We’ve had wee signs of it, six weeks ago we beat Rangers, a few weeks ago we beat Hearts. The 45 minute performance was strong on Saturday.
“We’ve never been hosed like that this season, and it has to be a reference for us now going forward.
“We go to Dundee United on Saturday and the first port of call is to try and keep a clean sheet and get back to getting a bit of confidence into our defensive work, and that’s what we’ll try and do. We’ll move on from this quickly.”