Hamilton Accies boss John Rankin confident he can haul club back from League One

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Shell-shocked Hamilton Accies boss John Rankin says he’s up for the challenge of hauling them back from League One next season.And the Accies head coach says they weren’t relegated because they lost the play-off final to Airdrie 6-5 on penalties, but a spell between October and December where they picked up only four points from nine games.Hamilton only won seven league games all season, and five of those came after reinforcements arrived in January.Rankin says there are no positives to be taken from the 2-2 aggregate draw with the Diamonds, and they have to evaluate what went wrong this season.He said: “I feel we deserved more than that.“I’m hugely disappointed that we're in the situation that we’re in, but if I look at the team that’s on the pitch today, it wasn’t that team that was relegated.“We didn’t get relegated today.

We got relegated between October and December, when everybody had discredited us at one point.“This team have been behind and almost out of sight on so many occasions, and they’ve risen to the challenge and come back.“We managed to fight back to get ourselves in a situation where we could save ourselves, and ultimately we were nearly there, but never quite got over the line.“That’s the disappointing thing.

The dressing room is quiet, I’m gutted for them as players and individuals, because they’ve given me everything they have, and I’m really disappointed.“But if I look at it over the whole, it wasn’t over the last four months.“The players over the last four months have given us everything.“There has been fight, there has been desire, and quality at times, when we added them in January and they’ve helped us.“But we didn’t get to the ultimate bit that I wanted to get to, which was safety.”Rankin says