THERE were roughly 40 supporters of Hamilton Accies who got up before dawn to cheer on their team at Inverness in a ridiculously early kick-off.

Every last one deserves a medal – perhaps even an OBE – because their team for 45 minutes played as if they were a struggling Sunday pub side.

And that is no exaggeration, I’m sorry to say.

Inverness Caledonian Thistle have been bottom of the Premiership all season for a reason. They aren’t any good.

And yet they scored twice and created half a dozen other good chances in a first half which Accies manager Martin Canning will surely make his players watch before they take on Motherwell in the mother of all Lanarkshire derbies.

No long ball over the top was defended properly, the Inverness players were free to run about utterly unmarked and were the Highlanders any good in front of goal it could have been humiliating.

True, Accies should have had a penalty in the second half when Inverness keeper Ryan Esson went through the back of Ali Crawford and at least Danny Redmond did score, albeit came in the very last second.

But for 45 long minutes this Hamilton team didn’t appear to realise that they were fighting for their lives.

“The start we made was frustrating,” admitted Canning. “ I spoke to the players about how all week we’re been hearing about how massive a game this was for Inverness, that is was so important for Inverness, and nobody was talking about how big a game it was for us.

“I told the players that this was our most important game of the season and for them not to be fooled this was all about Inverness.

"You have to guard against thinking that and in the first-half we went out to play a game of football while they were fighting for their lives.

“At this stage of the season, the first thing you have to do is fight to allow you to them play football. We tried to play football from the start, they set out to win a battle.

"They did that, they stopped us playing our game and that was disappointing for me."

Motherwell are at Hamilton next week. It's not going to be pretty.

Canning said: "Next Saturday is going to be exactly the same. We need to first win the battle.

"If we think we can just knock the ball about against Motherwell and be nice to watch it’s going to be difficult for us.

“So we need to win the battle and that will mean we can go and dictate the game and be on the front foot as Inverness were on Saturday.”