Jak Alnwick has read the riot act to his St Mirren team-mates as he warned they are way past the point of self-reflection after a seven-game winless run.
The Buddies keeper left nothing and nobody out in a scathing analysis of the Paisley side’s predicament as a stalemate with Ross County proved the last straw.
Just one goal in five games compounds the list of grievances and the Englishman insists it’s time to start calling team-mates out.
The 28-year-old has also banned top-six talk from his vocabulary and insists it’s time for action and not words.
He said: “I’m going to forget about saying the top six. I’m sick of saying it, I’m sick of going, ‘We’re going to get top six, we’re going to do this...’
“Forget about that, we need to win a game. We need to win a game of football. It’s not looking ‘we need this, we need that’, load of rubbish. We need to go and win a game of football.
“No matter whether we turned up today with a scrappy 1-0 win and you run off celebrating in the 95th minute, I don’t care. Or whether you win 5-0 I couldn’t care less, we need to win a game of football.
“There’s a few people need to have a little bit of a reality check. Players need to start digging in and there’s times in the game where we need to be a bit more professional and get our shape.
“We had a go but it’s not good enough at home to Ross County who are down there fighting for their lives. Credit to them, they came and played an expansive game and left three-up at times and I thought they were brilliant but we need to come in and have a look at a few things and see what’s said.
“You put points on the board, not performances.”
Jim Goodwin ’s side are now eighth in the Premiership table and Alnwick revealed a full and frank half-time summit failed to fire his side into life.
And he fired another rocket at his team-mates for being asked to pull off a string of saves.
He said: “It was too many saves for a home game against Ross County. We’ll have a look back at it again but not good enough at every single level.
“I thought they looked like scoring more than us. We had a few that bobbled around the box that we’ve got to put in the net but we’ll just keep saying the same things over and over again. Unless we put the ball in the back of the net you can’t win a football game.
“I’m not going to say too much but at half-time there were words from myself to certain people and from the manager to certain people and that’s it, that’s football.
“Sometimes you dig a few out at half-time just to get that reaction and I didn’t think we reacted in the second half. They had the better chances and they should’ve won the game.”
St Mirren’s second-half display against the Highlanders was a marked improvement from the first and Alnwick is a fan of having his side on the front foot as anything less sends him to sleep.
He said: “I know the way that we’re trying to play, we’re trying to press teams and I love that. I’ve been at teams before where you sit off, there’s a lot of teams like Motherwell do it really well, St Johnstone do it, they sit off and I’ll be honest it’s not how I want to play, I think it’s boring.
“I think it’s good that we go and get in people’s faces but we’ve got to have a bit of a think at times.
“You can’t always do it for 90 minutes, we’ve just got to be a bit smarter in the way we press and then we’ve got to take our chances.
“I don’t know if it’s one goal in four or five games, something like that. It’s not good enough.”
