Robinson confident St Mirren will get back to form after Montrose defeat

Stephen Robinson is confident his team will bounce back from their defeat to Montrose in the League Cup group stage opener.

The St Mirren boss was one of the candidates for Manager of the Year in May after guiding the Paisley side to a top-six Premiership finish.

And he insists they haven’t suddenly become a bad team overnight after one defeat.

Speaking ahead of their second group stage game at home to Arbroath on Saturday, the Northern Irishman said: “We need to win the game if we want to move on in the cup competition, we looked last week like it was a pre-season game with the team just finding it’s feet.

“Ultimately I take full responsibility for that, but there’s nowhere else to actually get players fit. But that’s not excuse, we should still win every game in the group stages.

“So we’ve put ourselves under a bit of pressure that we have to get a result tomorrow, but we know we are more than capable of that.

“We’ve taken the criticism this week, and deservedly so. I was nominated for Manager of the Year two or months ago, and now just 93 minutes later I am rubbish and my players are rubbish.

“Football is a wee bit of a pantomime at times and we have to treat it like that and not take it to personally.

“We got the criticism and we’ll respond to that and make sure we put in a better performance than last Saturday.”

He also hinted that on-loan Maccabi Haifa forward Stav Nahmani could feature at some stage to make his debut for the club.

Although Robinson admitted that it’s come to early for the 20-year-old Israel U21 striker to start the game.

He said: “He certainly won’t start the game, he hasn’t played competitively for eight or nine weeks now, but he’s had three days training with us now so hopefully the game will allow us to give him some minutes at some stage.

“We have arranged a couple weeks for just after the cup games finish so we can get him up to speed, and not just Stav, we have a few forward players that are needing game time.”