ROSS Forbes hopes last weekend’s strike for team-mate Ricki Lamie can ‘open the floodgates’ for the stopper — and that he can enjoy a run of scoring just like fellow defender Thomas O’Ware.

Forbes says every member of the Morton squad was delighted for Lamie last weekend after the 23-year-old bagged his first goal for the club in over two-and-a-half years.

Lamie equalised in the 93rd minute against fierce rivals St Mirren to seal a point for the Greenock men, and Forbes and his team-mates savoured the moment.

He told the Tele: “All the boys are close. Big [Ricki] Lamie gets a lot of stick in training during the week for never scoring, so when he scored everyone was really happy for him and we’re delighted for him to get his goal.

“He gets the stick, but he takes it well. He deserved his goal and I thought he took it brilliantly. The ball came at him quite fast and it’s a great finish.” After the game, Lamie jokingly described his finish as ‘striker’s instinct’, but Forbes said: “I don’t know about that, having one goal in two-and-a-half years. But if that’s what he wants to call it, that’s fine. Maybe it’s the floodgates opening. I hope so.”

Of the match in general, Forbes insists Morton were well deserving of at least a point after their constant pressure in the second half. And he reckons they were unlucky to be behind at half-time after they hit the bar and could have had a penalty — when Gary Oliver was booted on the face inside the penalty area by the Buddies’ Gary Irvine.

Jamie McDonagh was later shown a straight red card for an incident involving Rocco Quinn — where the Ton striker appeared to aim a kick at the St Mirren star’s face. 

But Forbes says the team huddled around each other after being reduced to 10 men, and captain O’Ware issued a rallying cry to stay focused on not giving up after the sending off.

He said: “I think we thoroughly deserved a point in the end, especially going down to 10 men with half an hour to play — it was backs up against the wall sort of thing for a while.

“But we rallied round and thoroughly deserved the draw.

“We just said [after McDonagh’s red] ‘keep going, stick together’. You’re always going to get a chance no matter who you’re playing, and when the chance comes you’re going to have to take it.

“We had a good few chances towards the end, and in the first half we had some good chances too. We hit the crossbar and should maybe have had a penalty as well when Gary was hit on the face, so we always knew the chance would come.”

Dumbarton are the visitors to Cappielow today and Forbes insists Ton won’t take their opponents lightly, despite having beaten them once and drawn the other in their previous two meetings.

The playmaker says the Sinclair Street side need to be on their 
A-game to continue that run this afternoon against Stevie Aitken’s men.

He said: “There’s never an expectation, but we will always go into each game wanting to win and get the three points.

“The league is quite close. You look at Dumbarton on Saturday past and their result, and you see even they are only seven points behind [back in eighth place]. So we know it’s a massive game and we won’t be going and just expecting to show up and get the three points.

“We’ve hit a bit of form, but we’ll need to be at our best to get the three points.

“We should’ve won the game at Cappielow against them when we had the chances at the end. We’re expecting a tough game, we would never think anything less. We need to perform to get that win.”