Callum Davidson wants St Johnstone to play with courage at Livingston

Callum Davidson wants St Johnstone to play with courage in their cinch Premiership game at Livingston on Saturday.

The Perth side’s gaffer was far from pleased with the performance in the 1-0 defeat by St Mirren last week and is looking for improvement in the final three fixtures of the season.

Saints are five points ahead of bottom side Dundee and eight behind the Buddies and Davidson acknowledged the importance of the trip to West Lothian.

He said: “It is huge. I have said all five post-split games are massive.

“We had a fairly good result against Dundee (1-1) and then a really disappointing one.

“I am looking for a good performance, I am looking for courage from the players to get on the ball and actually play football the right way. If we do that we will create chances.

“Livingston have had a couple of good results lately, they are a really hard team to play against, they work really hard for each other so we have to make sure we go about our business the right way.

“The players are as disappointed as I am from last week.

“We didn’t perform, we didn’t turn up, we need to put that right as a group this week.

“If you perform well and get beat sometimes you accept it but I just didn’t think we performed to the standards we have been at and it is up to us on Saturday to get back to that.”

Davidson insists he will not be looking over his shoulder at Dundee, who face St Mirren this weekend.

He said: “We will try to take care of ourselves. If you start looking behind you, you start to become a bit nervous.

“We have to look at the next three games and say, ‘right, we need to pick up points’ and it needs to start on Saturday.

“It was a really disappointing result last Saturday, how do we go about rectifying that?”