By grabar
February 7 2009

Mark McGhee was happy to defend his change in formation this afternoon in our Cup tie with St. Mirren at Fir Park. He defended his team selection by saying, “That’s the way we play, we beat Dundee Utd 4-0 playing like that only a few weeks ago. "Our instruction to them was to get the ball in behind them. We weren't able to do that. "Even balls that were set back to the likes of Quinn, who would normally would just put it in the channel, he was having to take another touch and getting put under pressure. "We did say we didn't particularly want them to play it at the back but at times you are forced to make a simple pass and the pitch even made it difficult to do that."So what do you do? You bang it up to front men the way St Mirren did and battle off that, but we felt we don't necessarily have the players to do that." He was pleased with the contribution of loan signing Cillian Sheridan, "Cillian has trained once in the gym with us and once for half an hour under the dome when the dome was falling on top of us. "So we didn't want to put him under pressure. Maybe we should have played 4-4-2 from the beginning but that's all right with hindsight. "That has worked for us lots of times and in the first half it didn't." The major positive for McGhee was that we got though to the next round, “There are a lot of good teams out already therefore it is good to still be in the draw.” He was also happy to have a laugh at the outrageous step overs from Maros Klimpl in the second half, “There are two doctors trying to unwind him at the moment!”