Tom Grivosti admits that confidence at St Patrick’s Athletic has taken a bit of a beating after back-to-back defeats for the Saints.

Having taken four points from the first two games, including a home draw with league leaders Derry City, Pat’s fell to a 5-0 loss to Dundalk in a horror show at Oriel Park and followed that up four days later with a 2-1 defeat to Sligo Rovers, leaving them potentially exposed for Friday’s visit to Richmond Park by in-form Bohemians.

“Last weekend was disappointing, the two results we had. Obviously, we just want to go put that right on Friday,” says English defender Grivosti.

"I felt like every shot we’ve faced in the last two games has gone in. We need to stop that, be more resilient, try to build ourselves into the game and at least keep it at two going into the second half and see where we find ourselves. You can’t let it get to the way it was.

“It’s not the start to the season we wanted or expected, but these things happen. I think Friday was a bit of a freak. Everything went wrong in the game that could have gone wrong for us. Then you go into Monday, straight into it, obviously low on confidence, and concede two bad goals and can’t seem to have the confidence to score ourselves. We’ve had a good week’s training and, hopefully, we can put that behind us.”

He says the squad have carried out an inquest. “We watched both games back on video. We had a long video [session] on Saturday morning after Friday and went through it and we had video there on Tuesday after Sligo.

"We know where we need to improve. We haven’t been scoring a lot of goals, and when you start conceding goals, it makes it an impossible task. We need to improve both ends of the pitch,” he says.

"It’s two defeats, we had a decent start with four points from our first two. Two results don’t change your whole season, we can go and put it right Friday and then it’s back to a decent start instead of a bad start.”

Pat’s beat Bohs three times in four meetings last season, but Grivosti admits that the Gypsies’ current crop are a stronger unit. 

“It will be a really tough game. You saw in the winter when they brought in a load of new players, you kind of knew they were going to be much better than they were last season.

"We watched the video of them this morning and they look like they’ve got decent physical strength and pace on the counter-attack. We know what they’re about and hopefully we can win tomorrow," he added.