Ross County manager Malky Mackay has replayed the key moments from Sunday’s 3-0 defeat at Hibs to his players – and backs them to learn from it.
Despite the scoreline in their second Scottish Premiership game of the season, he was encouraged by the way they created their own chances against the early league leaders.
Three goals in 11 first half minutes blew the Staggies clean out of the water, yet they started the match well enough and stood up stronger in the second half to leave Edinburgh with no further damage.
That followed on from their opening day 0-0 draw against double cup winners St Johnstone.
Martin Boyle’s opener was deflected before headers from Kyle Magennis and Christian Doidge in the box buried County’s hopes.
The manager explained that looking in detail at what went wrong is vital on the path for improvement.
He said: “We had a good chat about it this week, and we looked at the areas we didn’t do so well at the weekend, and we looked at the areas that I thought were positive.
“They’re only just getting used to how I want to work that, what the debrief looks like, but it’s about learning.
“It’s not about pointing fingers, it’s about showing them stuff – good and bad – and allowing them to come up and talk to us about the mistakes and look at it.
“I think that’s how you best learn. You watch it again, and then you let them talk through the three or four areas that changed for a goal to happen.”
Finer details to learn from
Mackay, who is overseeing a massive overhaul in the player pool, feels that pinpointing the specific areas which led to the creation of a goal against his team is crucial.
He added: “There are always three or four points in a move that leads to a goal, or a chance, where one of us could do something different to stop it happening.
“Once they start to see that, they learn from it.
“The video footage, cutting clips and letting them see things is a huge learning tool.
“A picture paints a thousand words, and that’s never truer than when you watch a chance leading to a goal and you can see what someone actually did.
“In hindsight, that might be different from what they thought they did, so they can see if they should have gone tighter.”
Precious time on training pitch
County are not in action this weekend because it’s the knockout stages of the League Cup, which they bowed out of largely due to a couple of forfeited ties caused by Covid.
Mackay explained that they are using that time wisely ahead of the home clash with champions Rangers a week on Sunday.
He added: “We saw that this weekend was going to come up, and I think the biggest benefit for us will be on the training pitch.
“We looked at maybe playing a friendly this weekend, but we decided against it because I really want to get three or four days of hard training into them to make up for that lost week.
“Just generally, we had that week where we couldn’t get a real pre-season week into them, so we’re actually going to do that this week.
“It’s going to be really tough up until Saturday, and the hope is that at the end of it, in their own minds they have got back up to where they should be with everyone else.”