SCORELINE DOESN'T LIE BUT IT DOESN'T TELL TRUTH

YOU can take comfort from every positive emotion we felt about going down 4-1 to Hearts at the weekend.

But the bottom line is that while the scoreline might have flattered the home team and been a distortion of the truth so far as I was concerned, we've taken just three points from a possible 15 so far.

It's time to freshen the side if we can and that's why I've been working closely with our director of football Graham Bennett on bring-ing in new players before the transfer window closes.

We'll do a loan deal or a permanent transfer, or both, if it helps.

There's a trialist from the north of England possibly on his way and with a decent pedigree and we've other irons in the fire.

We're now waiting for return calls and being pro-active in the transfer market because I realise how important the month of September will be for us.

So far, we've lost to sides who were, in the main, top-six clubs last season. We might have deserved to take something from every one of those games but we didn't get anything like that.

Now we're going into a programme that has us against Motherwell, Dundee United, Kilmarnock and Dunfermline. These clubs will be in our company throughout the season and we need to do well against them.

It's an SPL fact that we've never lost to Motherwell at Fir Park, which is our next game, but that doesn't lessen the importance of the match.

I remember losing to them in Lanarkshire when I was a Caley Thistle player and we were facing them in the League Cup years ago so I don't think we've got any special kind of protection there.

Rival clubs give Caley Thistle a different level of respect today. We're no longer the underdogs in every match we play and that puts a different onus on my team, whether they're at home or away.

We held a team meeting at the ground yesterday to discuss what's happened so far and one word kept recurring - and that was "frustrating". When we scored an equaliser against Hearts on Saturday, there was a 10-minute period when we had the game by the scruff of the neck.

Even the Hearts coaching staff admitted to me that was the case.

Our impression of the 90 minutes at Tynecastle was that, in parts of the game, we played as well as we have done since the season started. But that's not what the finals result suggests.

And the record books won't take into account that we missed Craig Dargo because of injury.

You can even go on about our nine corners to the three for Hearts but they'll just point to the final score as the statistic that matters. And they'd be correct.

What matters to us now, apart from some favourable phone calls in response to our transfer inquiries, is that we can get Denis Wyness fit for the trip to Motherwell.

I'm told by our medical people that it'll be next Monday before we know if his dislocated shoulder will heal in time. The swelling has to go down before the full picture is revealed but the feeling is he's touch and go for Fir Park.

Hopefully, he'll be with us and have new faces for company on the trip from Inverness.

Taken from the Daily Record