Manager Neil Warnock sat down with the media on Friday morning to preview our trip to Kilmarnock. RedTV subscribers can watch in full through the video above.

“I watched our last game down at Kilmarnock and one or two people have commented how poor we were. I just thought we can give a better account of ourselves. My first time in management, I was involved with the Oldham and Preston pitches many, many, many years ago. They used to bounce over your head when they bounced on those pitches. It has come on but all credit to Kilmarnock and to Derek. I think it is an advantage to him every other week (the astro-turf pitch), but at the same time, they’ve done brilliant on grass. They could have easily beaten Celtic, they have beaten both the big teams this year. It shows you what you can do with a good group of players. They’re obviously playing for him and I’m hoping our lads can give them a good game.

“When you look at the goals we’ve conceded, it’s not collective mistakes, it’s individual mistakes while I’ve been here and nine out of 10 times the goals we’ve conceded, it’s people making the right decision. You hope that defenders have got that upbringing to know what to do in the right position and unfortunately we’ve made bad mistakes and it’s cost us. Nearly every mistake we’ve made has cost us, even against Bonnyrigg in the cup, we made a couple of elementary mistakes which could have let them back into the game, we cleared one off the line. We have talked about it and worked a little bit on it but at the end of the day, we haven’t got a lot of choice at the back and they’re going to have to do better because they’ll be tested tomorrow. We were almost getting bullied in the last game looking at it and that that’s not good enough.

“We had a free week this week with no midweek game and you need that. I know we’ve got a midweek game next week and then we have another blank week. We can only put so much into training and there are some bits still left unturned we’ve got to work on. It is nice to have blank weeks rather than just preparing for games. It’s new to me tomorrow and the lads are going to have to show me what they are made of really because you can’t go there and just lay down, not when you take Aberdeen fans all that way as well. I’m hoping to give a good account of ourselves. I can always put up with a defeat if they’ve given me everything. What I don’t want to do is look at defeats when I know they could do more, and that’s what I’m looking for. I want to make sure that they give everything they’ve got while they’re on that pitch.

“They know what they’re doing. They’ve got good wide players. I had Matty Kennedy at Cardiff and I know he puts a great ball in and Armstrong as well. The lads up front have good quality, so we know we’re going to be under pressure all the time, but what we’ve got to do is make sure that their lads are under pressure, and that they’re under just as much as what we are. They’ve lost one in 13 from what I can gather and I think that was against Rangers. It shows you what we’re up against.

“You’ve got to go into the game thinking you can win every game. We know what we’re up against. They’ve done really well, an excellent team, but you know, like I say watching the last game, we’ve got to give them more of a game than the last time we went there. And that’s all I can assure the fans that we’ll be putting more into that.

“We should be in a far better position, but we’re not. There’s reasons why we are like that and we’ve got to up our game in the last 13 games.

“Team news I don’t think we’ve got any problems. Jimmy McGarry trained yesterday as well for the first time. I don’t know whether he’d be involved on Saturday, but he’s close which gives us another body.”