Captain Michael Devlin sees Livingston improvement but says results must follow

Michael Devlin has told his Livingston colleagues the hard-luck stories have to stop soon because they are running out of opportunities to save their Premiership skin.

The Lions have been cast adrift at the foot of the table after Saturday’s 3-2 defeat at Ross County, who scored a stoppage-time winner. It was the second time in successive away games they had been denied a point by a late goal after suffering a similar fate at Kilmarnock.

Captain Devlin is encouraged by the way Livingston have been playing but he admits they cannot afford to continue squandering chances to improve their predicament over the remaining 11 matches if they are to have any hope of staying in the top flight.

“I think we have been playing better for a few weeks,” he said, speaking ahead of Wednesday’s match at home to Motherwell.

“I think there were periods earlier in the season when it was tough, we weren’t getting points, we weren’t scoring goals and performances weren’t where they needed to be, but I think more recently they have been better.

“That feeling of knowing we’re not too far away gives us a bit of confidence and belief, but we are running out of opportunities. We can’t continue to say performances are better when we are not getting results.”

Saturday’s defeat left Livi six points adrift of County, while they are eight behind St Johnstone and 10 below Well ahead of Wednesday’s showdown. Devlin knows they cannot allow themselves to become further detached.

“It would be naive to think we don’t have an eye how cut adrift we are,” he said. “We need to stay as close as possible to whoever is 11th and then we go and play all of the teams round about us after the split.

“We’ve probably been a bit lucky that other teams have stalled a bit in their results and they’ve not pulled away. We’ve still got an opportunity if we can go on a run and pick up a few wins.

“After beating St Mirren (earlier this month), if we’d managed to go on and win the next two or three games after that against the teams closest to us, we could have pulled ourselves right back into the pack and maybe have pulled in a couple of other teams that felt they were far enough away from us.

“We didn’t manage to do that on Saturday but we still have another opportunity to go and pick up three points against another team that are not too far away from us (Motherwell).”