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Sport
Paul Thomson

Hamilton Accies boss will drop stars for Inverness cup clash as he demands reaction to Queen's Park defeat

John Rankin has guaranteed to ring the changes for Hamilton's SPFL Trust Trophy clash with Inverness after their Hampden horror show during last week's defeat to Queen's Park.

The Championship's bottom side suffered a 4-0 defeat to Queen's Park, where all of the goals came in the first half, and the angry Accies boss says he will bench a number of those involved in the painful defeat.

That result had supporters calling for their manager to go amid a run of four straight league defeats and Rankin says his side need to show the fans a reaction.

He said: "Nobody has a right to stay in the team after Saturday's performance so there will be changes.

"That's a guarantee.

"There will be a response to what happened.

"Saturday was obviously a sore one to take. We were too passive, there was no aggression and, quite rightly so, we have taken criticism for that.

"In this job you are always under scrutiny so nothing has changed for me since the first day.

"I am well aware of where we are.

"It is never nice for a professional to be criticised so we have to have professional pride, stand up to that and let our actions be counted.

"We can only respond in the next game and we are looking for a reaction now.

"It was schoolboy defending and when you break it down and show clips from the first half, the players accept it and take responsibility for it.

"Most importantly, they hold themselves accountable and they admit that they could have done something better, so we need to work on those issues to help them and progress them."

Inverness themselves will also make a host of changes after announcing they will be forced to field a youth team in Saturday's fourth round tie due to an injury crisis at the club.

That will make Rankin's side big favorites to progress to the quarter-finals, but he says they won't treat the game any differently as they look to replicate the performance they produced in October's 1-0 league victory in the Highlands.

He added: "We've heard that Inverness are struggling with injuries and they are going to play their kids, but we can only go and play the team that is in front of us and if Inverness are playing a young team, we have to go and beat them.

"We can't go out and not treat it properly.

"When we went up to Inverness we had a good result and a good team performance.

"Everything came together that night.

"When you look at the way we played without the ball and in possession, we were really good that night so it will take something similar to beat Inverness on Saturday.

"No matter what players they put out on the pitch, we need to find a way to break them down and that's what we'll be aiming to do."

Asked if Accies, too, could turn to their young players to start the tie, he said: "We’ve seen Lewis Latona start before, Gabe Forsyth come on for 45 minutes.

“Ryan One has had his starting debut at 16, Liam Morgan and Ben Black have featured as well at 16, so of course we will see our young players at some point.”

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