JOHN has always been the more laidback and less acerbic of the two Sutton brothers but in the aftermath of St Mirren’s latest defeat the striker offered the sort of candid assessment that has made sibling Chis such an engaging if contentious media pundit.

“A disaster,” was how the younger Sutton described both the 3-0 home defeat to Queen of the South and his team’s predicament at the foot of the Championship, seven points behind ninth-place Ayr United and with just 16 games left to try to get out of it. It was a succinct but accurate summation.

Against a team winless in their previous 13 league games, St Mirren showed little sign of the fight that will be needed if they are to somehow avoid dropping into the third tier of Scottish football for the first time in their history.

The feistiest it got was actually after the game when manager Jack Ross took exception to what he felt had been some over-the-top and personal criticism and stepped into the main stand to confront the supporter in question. The exchange seemed civil enough and the fans who stayed to witness it offered Ross a round of applause once it was over, but it was a further symptom of a club that lost its way several years ago and hasn’t been able to get back on track ever since.

St Mirren won’t throw in the towel until they are arithmetically down but Sutton did not look like a man of a mind to focus on the positives as he picked over the bones of another bad day at the office.

“The way we played was a disaster,” said the striker who had a first-half header cleared off the goal line. “It followed on from the end of the Morton game last week [when they lost a last-minute equaliser]. We are where we are – bottom of the league.

“The club has a good stadium and we can take in more than 3,000 fans, which is more than some Premiership clubs. So there is this expectation that we will get ourselves out of trouble. But unless the 11 players on the pitch are doing the business, you’re not going to get out of it. We are still well adrift at the bottom of the league. There’s no other way of looking at it – it would be a disaster if it stays that way.

“At the start of the season, we looked at our squad and fancied our chances of being up the other end of the table. That hasn’t materialised and it has just spiralled from there. The potential for the club is clearly there, but nothing’s going to change unless the 11 guys on the pitch start producing.

“It’s so disappointing because the club clearly has a lot of potential. But, unless we pull our finger out, that’s all academic.”

St Mirren hit the crossbar through Kyle McAllister in the second half but lost soft goals to Stephen Dobbie and Joe Thomas before Gary MacKenzie put through his own net.

“We are conceding cheap goals and not looking like scoring at the other end of the pitch. You can’t really take too many positives, to be honest. The reality is that we are nowhere near the level we should be at in terms of our performances. It’s not a time to go hiding. Some teams have escaped from this kind of trouble before and we need to believe in ourselves than we can do it as well.

But did we get crosses into the box? No. Did we trouble their keeper? No. Did they look like scoring when they went down the other end? Yeah. Those aren’t good omens for us.”