George Oakley hat-trick gets new Raith Rovers manager Barry Robson off to losing start at Ayr

Oakley scored his first goal with just two minutes on the clock from a Jamie Murphy cross, added another ten minutes later from a Jay Henderson corner and got the better of visiting goalkeeper Kevin Dabrowski again on 25 minutes, thanks to a Connor MacLennan assist.

That result lifts Ayr up to second place in football’s William Hill Championship, on 38 points from 20 fixtures, and leaves Raith sixth, on 24 from 19.

Robson blamed getting off to a bad start for the Kirkcaldy club’s ninth defeat of the current league season, branding their performance in South Ayrshire in front of a crowd of 2,733 as unacceptable.

“The game didn’t even start well. We were a minute or two in and we lost a goal from direct play from Ayr and then we lost another goal, and you’ve got a real uphill struggle after that once you’ve gone two goals down,” the 46-year-old told Raith TV afterwards.

“They got the momentum in the game and then confidence drained out of us.

“When you lose an early goal, what you can’t do is lose another one right away, because that is normally what happens.

“If you lose an early goal, fine, you get together, don’t panic, don’t go chasing, stay in your structure and let the game settle down, but we lost two goals, then a third one before we managed to settle down into what we wanted to be.

“If you’re overhyped going into a game, you can actually go the other way but tactically we did a few things in the first ten minutes where we were overcovering rather than sating ‘be brave’.

“It’s hard to come here and it’s a really difficult pitch to play on and you’ve got physicality coming on top of you, but we need to deal with that better.

“The team got drained of confidence after that start.”

Robson’s second match in charge of Raith is also on the road, at Greenock Morton, currently one league place and one point worse off than their visitors, this coming Saturday, with kick-off at 3pm, and he’s hoping for a better defensive display that time round to help end a four-game winless run versus the Inverclyde outfit, their last victory against them having been away in October 2023.

“We didn’t deal well with diagonal balls today and crosses coming in, so we had to change systems after 20 minutes and we shouldn’t need to be doing that,” said the ex-Aberdeen gaffer.

“We won’t accept that first half and we need to get better.

“The game started and we were two goals down – we won’t accept that, I will not accept that, this club won’t accept that.

“What we’ll do is get the players back, get on the training pitch and move forward and we’ll try and get ourselves up this league.

“I saw some things that I liked, I saw a lot of things I didn’t like, but sometimes you can’t jump in. You can’t be rash in judging players.

“We’ve all been there as players, as coaches, as managers when a game goes against you and you’re drained of confidence. It’s silly to go and judge players when things like that happen.”