PETER Leonard suffered his “toughest day” in the job after his Cumnock side were demolished by Auchinleck Talbot in the Junior Cup.

The ‘Nock boss wasn’t best pleased with his players after an improved run of form lately. He said: “We’re extremely, extremely disappointed.

“We had improved in recent weeks, playing a decent quality of football and today, just quite simply, we weren’t brave enough. We weren’t good enough. It ended up, we weren’t able to pass the ball through from the back, our usual game.

“A lot of individual performances, really, were just not up to standard. Any team coming to Townhead Park and beating Cumnock 5-1 is a bad, bad day. We’re very disappointed because we thought we were making progress and that’s put us a couple of steps back after that result.

“Without out doubt, it’s the toughest day since I’ve taken over the job. Even the first time we played them when I first took over it was a closer score than that.

“The third goal that Talbot got seemed to be against the run of play but it was just to easy. Shankland cuts in from the left-hand side, drops the shoulder and it’s a goal. We’re too easy beat in those circumstances.

“Certainly, at half time, I thought we were back in the game again. I thought, first half, they could have been out of sight but we managed to hang on in there. We never played our game today so we really deserved to get nothing from the game and that’s exactly what we got.

“We had some poor performances from some of our experienced players today in distribution of the ball, giving it away to easy and panicking on the ball. We had been passing it a lot better than that so God knows where that performance came.”

‘Nock frontman Keir Samson shared his manager’s sentiments, even though he felt he didn’t have a bad game himself. Samson said: “I thought I did well, I thought I got in behind them really good.

“There was one in the first half I should have probably scored but, apart from that, I thought I did well personally but it’s not really about me, it’s about the team. We weren’t good enough.

“The better team won. We were lucky to go in 2-1 down to be fair. Individual errors just cost us all game. We can’t have any complaints, we weren’t good enough.

“I think the boys need to now re-group and kick on against the Glens because we’ve been playing well to be fair. We’ve scored a lot of goals but it’s conceding that’s the problem.

“We’re conceding almost 2.6 goals per game. That means we need to score three goals to win a game, it’s not good enough.

“We need to lift ourselves, we can’t feel sorry for ourselves or well find we are back down at the bottom of the league. We’ve got a couple of big games coming up but we just need to kick on.”