St Johnstone defender Joe Shaughnessy is confident that the pain of an early European exit will not linger into the domestic season.
After being knocked out of the Europa League in the first qualifying round, Saints have no Betfred Cup groups games, meaning there is a gap of the best part of a month until their next competitive fixture – the August 5 Premiership opener at Kilmarnock.
There is one friendly with Sunderland in that time and Shaughnessy expects the hole to be plugged with more.
Being physically right for the league season won’t be an issue, according to the former Aberdeen man, and the same goes for being mentally right.
“I don’t know what the manager has planned for us,” he said. “I’m sure he will be arranging games though because it’s a month until the season starts.
“We are pretty fit anyway so it will be just a case of keeping ticking over and building up to the season starting.
“It’s disappointing to go out of Europe so early but we just need to pick ourselves up and go again.
“We have enough strong characters in our dressing-room so there won’t be any hangover from this.
“The focus goes back on to domestic football now and the aim will be to challenge for the top six again.”
Summer football has been introduced in Shaughnessy’s homeland but he doesn’t envisage Scotland following Ireland’s lead – even if he acknowledged that match sharpness played a part in Saints’ two-leg defeat to FK Trakai.
“I have never played summer football so I can’t talk about it too much,” he said.
“But I definitely think them being half-way through their season helped them in the first leg.
“It was our first competitive game for five weeks or so and I think that showed early on with the way we started the game.
“I think if we played them in October when we are a dozen games into our season we would definitely beat them.
“But that’s not the way our season works. They were sharper than us for half an hour in the first half of the first tie and they’ve put us out.
“I thought they had a few decent players. Their striker was clinical and we were not – that was the difference over the two legs.
“When you’re in your season and people have been playing together, you’ve gelled better.
“But we can’t use that as an excuse because over the two games we should have been good enough to get through.
“I can’t see us going to summer football in Scotland, even though it would help teams like us when we’re in Europe.
“The season has always been the way it is just now and I don’t think they will change it.”
Shaughnessy was Saints’ only goalscorer across the 180 minutes of football and, as well as finding the net with a header at McDiarmid Park, there were another three opportunities for him in the air in Vilnius.
Those chances apart, though, creativity in the opposition box definitely proved to be an issue for the Perth men.
“It wasn’t really our night on Thursday,” he said. “Nothing went right for us and it’s frustrating.
“We controlled the game and were all over them, but without creating any real glaring chances.
“They didn’t trouble us at all until the goal, which came from us chasing the game at the end, but our final ball let us down.
“We wanted to score because we felt if we did we would go on to beat them, but we just couldn’t do it.
“We had enough possession and got into the final third plenty, but we just lacked that killer ball to open them up properly.
“It’s disappointing and frustrating because we put a lot into it over the two legs and had some really good chances in the game at Perth.
“But things just didn’t go for us.
“I felt that for three quarters of the tie we were better than them but the first 20 minutes of the first leg has killed us.
“We left ourselves a huge hill to climb to get back into it but it just wasn’t to be.
“The damage was done in the first leg but even after that, with the amount of possession we had and the good positions we were in, we should have got the job done over there.
“It’s just so disappointing to be out in the first round.”
