ANTON McElhone has taken the blame for the Dundee goal which saw his Morton side denied their first victory of the year.

Craig McGuffie’s first-half wonder strike was cancelled out by Jason Cummings before Luca Colville’s header midway through the second half put the hosts 2-1 up.

But the interim boss admits that his tactical error cost them the crucial win as the Ton defence were caught out by a quick free-kick which led to Danny Mullen heading home to rescue a point for the Dark Blues.

With Morton now nine games without a win, Saturday's result leaves them in eighth place in the Championship, two points above Saturday's opponents Ayr United.

McElhone called for his side to improve the defensive side of their game but he also wanted to take the positives out of the draw.

He told the Tele: “The second one was on us, I’ll take the responsibility on that. I was the one who changed the markers.

“We’ve still got to deal with it, we’ve got enough men in the box there to deal with that and they still go on and score.

“There’s an element of wondering what we’ve got to do to win a game but, then again, you just need to score more than the other team and concede less.

“At the end of the day we’ve scored two good goals and we’ve been undone by two slack ones.

“The first one was a simple mistake from an easy flick-on.

“When we’ve gone 2-1 up you’re ideally looking to hold on but we knew that they’d throw the kitchen sink at us, they wanted to go and win the game as well.

“They’re competing with us to try and get up the table, but at the end of the day we’ve got to defend better and the guys know that.

“We’ve got to look at the positives, we’ve picked up a point against a team with a big budget and aspire to be challenging near the top of the league.

“We’ve got to keep picking up points, regardless of what goes on as long as we keep on looking after ourselves.

“If we’d have lost that game it would’ve been doom and gloom and we could’ve been sitting in a worse position."

McElhone revealed that his players were left beating themselves up after the game over the manner in which they had conceded both goals.

He is adamant that there is no doubting the commitment of his players going into the run-in as he switches his attention to the vital Ayr United clash on Saturday.

He said: “We’ve got a dressing room who are bursting at each other after the game and it shows you how much they care and how much they want to do well.

“They’ve not just gone ‘ach it’s a point, we’ll take it’. They feel as if they should’ve won it.

“We’ve got to move on from it though, we’re doing the right things and that’s all we can ask from the players.

“It’s tough circumstances but we move on, we can’t do anything about it now.”