Jim Goodwin: Lots of incentives for both Dundee Utd and Motherwell this weekend

Jim Goodwin believes Dundee United’s trip to Motherwell on Saturday is packed with incentives as he looks for his side to make amends for dropping points last week.

A late Bruce Anderson penalty gave Kilmarnock a 1-1 draw at Tannadice and left the Taysiders in fourth place in the William Hill Premiership, two points ahead of Motherwell.

Stuart Kettlewell’s side won 2-1 in both previous meetings between the clubs this season and United boss Goodwin wants to turn the table at the third attempt.

He said: “Obviously we know Motherwell well enough, given that we’ve already played against them a couple of times this season, and we’ve found ourselves on the wrong end of both results, unfortunately.

“But we’re going into the game with a lot of confidence with the group unbeaten in our last five games.

“And we want to go down to Motherwell to give a good account of ourselves and make sure that we’re on the right side of the result this time around.

“We go into every game trying to win it, we feel that we done enough last Saturday to win the game, and we certainly felt after the game that we had dropped two points.

“So we’d like to go down the road this weekend and try and make amends for that, and try and take maximum points.

“I think our performances in both games that we’ve played against Motherwell so far this season have actually been very good.

“The only criticism probably could be that we lacked a bit of ruthlessness in front of goal, with the chances that we created.

“Added to that we also shot ourselves in the foot on a couple of occasions with some of the goals that we’ve conceded.

“Obviously, Motherwell are going into the game off the back of a really positive result against St Mirren last weekend, having had to weather a difficult patch, run of fixtures and results that I’m sure they wouldn’t have been happy about.

“But, there’s lots of incentives there. Obviously to open up a five-point gap would be great, but on the flip side of that the incentive for Motherwell is to try and go above us.

“So there’s a lot riding on the game for both teams. But if we can build on last weekend’s performance against Kilmarnock, that would be really good, because I think it’s probably one of our best performances of the season to date in terms of, particularly in possession.

“I thought we played really, really well. We created enough chances to win the game, and unfortunately, just couldn’t hang on towards the end, a real rash decision to give away the penalty, and that unfortunately led to us dropping a couple of points.”