Hamilton Accies boss John Rankin says everybody at the club is working round the clock to bring in a striker as they bid to avoid relegation from the Championship.
Rankin is conscious that they need to replace Andy Ryan, who moved to Northern Irish club Larne late last month, and says the 2-0 Scottish Cup fifth round defeat against Hearts underlined the need for reinforcements up front.
While he says they’re restricted to loans or free agents, Rankin says they’re doing what they can to unearth somebody who can fire them up the league table.
He told Lanarkshire Live Sport: “It’s not rocket science; we know where we need to strengthen, what we’re trying to bring in, and we’re working really hard to bring somebody in who is going to help us.
“You never know how close you are, but we’re continuing to work hard.
“It has been the focus of the full January window and it still remains the same.
“We’re trying. It just becomes a case of now it needs to be free agents or loans, and we’re continually working hard, we’re working tirelessly at it – but if nobody comes up then we obviously can’t do anything about that.
“We saw tonight, whether it be the final ball, the final shot, final cross – we need to do it a wee bit earlier, a wee bit sharper, or with a wee bit more conviction and quality.”
Rankin added: “It’s no secret that we lost Andy Ryan, we’ve lost our number nine, and we need to replace him.
“Everybody at the club is trying to do that and make that happen, and we’ve still got a period of time when we can do that.”
Stephen Humphrys and Cammy Devlin fired Hearts into a 2-0 win that takes them into the quarter-final draw, and Rankin admits Accies were too passive in the first half.
But he added: “I thought the players were compact and we were hard to play through at times.
“They’ve got good players, we knew that, but in the second half I thought we put them under some real pressure for 30 minutes.
“We weren’t expected to get through but what we demand is that we’re competitive in every game.
“In the first half it looked as if we didn’t believe in ourselves in what we were trying to do, but certainly in the second half I felt we were much more aggressive in trying to create and get in behind Hearts.”
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