MORTON boss Dougie Imrie insists a bigger squad isn't always better as he continues to explore the Scottish loan market.

Last week the club sent youth academy graduates Reece Lyon and Michael Garrity out to League Two sides until January, with 17 players available to the Ton manager.

As much as he wants to strengthen his pool of players, Imrie believes it can be difficult to manage a larger squad, so he isn’t worried about the options he has heading into tomorrow's game against Queen's Park.

He told the Tele: "You can only use five subs, so I don’t know why people want to keep highlighting the number of players that are on the bench.

"If I have a big squad then you need to make a lot of people happy.

"We want to try to strengthen, but that will determine whether we can get players out from other clubs.

"With the market closing we can only get players in from Scotland.

"We are hopeful managers from other clubs will allow us to have players that we are looking to add to our squad.

"It is not a big deal on my part, when we have got a smaller squad, it is easier to manage than having 20-23 players, then you have got to try manage everybody.

"From that aspect I am not too worried about the amount of bodies we have in the building at the moment."

The 39-year-old says the message to his players will remain unchanged as they look to create similar openings as they did in their defeat to Ayr last weekend with the hope of being more clinical in front of goal.

He said: "The message is always the same, we always want to win every game we go into.

"When you lose you get criticised, but so far this season performance levels have been pretty good.

"Yes, we all know we are looking to get that striker that is going to bang in goals, but you could say that about every team.

"Every team is looking for a striker that is going to score 10-15 goals a season, so we are not the only club in the same position.

"The only negative is that we don’t have someone to do that, but the boys that are up there performing week-in, week-out are doing a good job.

"On another day we take one or two of those chances [against Ayr], but overall so far this season I am pretty pleased with the way we are playing and we have just got to keep going.

"It's another tough game away to Queen's Park, who came up from League One.

"Their form is pretty good, they lost on Saturday up at Dundee but anybody could lose up there.

"We have to go and take the game to Queen's, put them under pressure and hopefully create as many chances as we did on Saturday and come away with three points."

Since Imrie’s appointment in December the Ton have had a good habit of responding to any setback that has come their way and the boss is hoping for similar when they head to Ochilview Park.

He added: "I have got to give great credit to my team.

"Every time we have had a bad result the boys have bounced back with a positive one.

"Again that is what we will be hoping for tomorrow, but we have to give respect to Queen's Park, they have come up and started the season pretty well.

"We know it is not going to be an easy game.

‘’We give teams respect but I am only interested in what we do as a team, and that will be the message tomorrow, that we are there to pick up three points, defend as best we can, and if we can keep another clean sheet, it gives us that platform to go try win the game."