John Sutton admits that St Mirren will have to shake the disappointment of last weekend’s Renfrewshire derby defeat out of their systems quickly to get their Championship challenge back on track.

Morton ran out comfortable winners over the Saints in the end, but there were mitigating circumstances with St Mirren conceding two penalties and having defender Jack Baird sent off.

While Sutton isn’t looking for excuses for the defeat, he feels that there was nothing between the sides on the day, and he is determined to help the Buddies prove their quality with a win over Livingston today.

“The derby defeat has lingered about a little bit,” Sutton said. “It’s never nice to lose so heavily to your local rivals.

“It was a strange game with the two penalties and the sending off, but we’ve got to pick ourselves up. “It’s a long season, we’ve certainly got off to a better start than last year, and if we win tomorrow then a lot of what happened will be forgotten.

“We would have liked to have played a little bit better when we had eleven men on the pitch, but it wasn’t like we were getting absolutely hammered for most of the game.

“So, it’s just one of those things. You’ve just got to take it on the chin.

“Losing at Morton hasn’t been so great, and we need to pick ourselves up again. Six points from nine would look pretty good, whereas three from nine wouldn’t be so good.

“Morton will obviously be pleased with the result, but we don’t feel as if we were an inferior team to them in any way and the next time we play them hopefully the result will be different.

“We’ve got a bit of a target on our back this season, because people probably regard us as one of the bigger sides in the division in terms of the support we get and the size of the squad now and our budget.

“That doesn’t count for anything though when you’re on the pitch, and we’ve got to make sure that we go out on the pitch and get the job done.”

Things almost went from bad to worse for St Mirren during the week when East Kilbride hit them with a sucker punch to take a late lead in their Irn-Bru Cup tie, only for the Buddies to strike back twice in the closing minutes to seal a comeback win.

As in the defeat to today’s opponents in the Betfred Cup a few weeks ago, the problem for the Saints that day was their wastefulness in front of goal, and Sutton believes it is something they must remedy.

“We have to be more clinical because goals change games,” he said. “If we had put away a couple of our early chances against East Kilbride for instance, it wouldn’t have been anywhere as nervy a night.

“Talk is cheap in that regard though, we have to go out and do it and hopefully that can start against Livingston.”

Sutton believes that the opening day win over Falkirk should set the standard for the Buddies to follow if they want to reach their goal of challenging at the top end of the table.

“We’ve got a good squad of players, the fans are really good and everything going for us,” he said

“Hopefully we’ll be challenging up the right end of the table this year where we should be.”