JACK ROSS said his discussions with Barnsley in midweek had no bearing on what transpired to be the worst performance of his team this season.

And he has backed his players to recover from what was a real mauling by Livingston who were simply excellent all over the field.

Ross opted not to be considered for the manager’s position at Oakwell insisting that the lure of winning the Championship title with St Mirren was too strong.

It was sod’s law that his players performed so poorly as Livingston won with some comfort thanks to a Ryan Hardie double, a Lee Miller overhead kick and Scott Robinson’s chip.

Ross said: “If you spoke to any of my players individually I don’t think they would want to use my discussions with Barnsley as an excuse. I’m not going to criticise my players in any way because they’ve been magnificent for me over a period of time.

“It’s sore and it’s disappointing but I have no qualms over it, we lost to the better team today – that will happen. Our response to losing a league game this season has always been to win the next one and if we do that we’ll remain in a good position.

“We knew it was going to be a difficult game, we expected that but I didn’t expect that performance in terms of our recent results – we had not lost a league game since the beginning of December.”

St Mirren had actually taken the lead inside three minutes when Ryan Flynn followed up to score after Cammy Smith’s shot had been blocked.

However, a calamitous collision between Jack Baird and Craig Samson allowed Hardie to equalise into an empty net in nine minutes and it was the catalyst for what was to come.

Hardie scored again in 16 minutes with a volley then veteran Miller showed spritely skills with a superb overhead kick in 22 minutes after being set up by Raffaele de Vita.

Robinson scored a fourth five minutes into stoppage time after being set up by Miller who had intercepted Liam Smith's attempted pass-back to Samson.

The Livingston manager David Hopkin said: “I think the players deserve great credit. They gave me everything today and I think our front two caused St Mirren’s defence problems all day.

“I had been after Ryan Hardie for two years because he’s a goalscorer and he showed that today.”