You have to hand it to Derek Adams. No, not his P45, as Roy McGregor just has.

Perhaps not since Dracula himself have we witnessed somebody with less capacity for reflection. And the stake has now been driven through the heart of his third – and inarguably disastrous – spell as Ross County manager.

Scottish football's answer to Liz Truss has gone, his 79 days in charge at County perhaps just eclipsing the lifespan of a lettuce, in fairness. But proving to be just as calamitous as the reign of the former PM.

After Adams’ infamous panning of Scottish football and the standard of his team, his men didn't win a match, and lost five of the seven they played. It is hard, it seems, to perform at your peak as a professional footballer after you’ve been tossed mercilessly under a bus.

Adams found out the hard way that in this day and age, the only reaction a manager is likely to provoke from castigating his own players in public is a downing of the tools. And when his team went down in pitiful fashion at Fir Park on Tuesday evening, he again avoided any notion that some of the blame may – perish the thought – lie with him.

READ MORE: Derek Adams quits Ross County job after just 79 days

Humility, though, didn’t seem to be his strongpoint. His post-match interviews became the stuff of legend, and Tuesday night’s was no exception. From the ‘Morecambe are 100 times better than County’ shot to the ‘refusing to say if he regrets coming back to Dingwall’ chaser, he couldn’t have given off the air of a man in a dire hostage situation more when he was in front of the camera supposing he wore an orange boiler suit and held up a copy of that day’s newspaper.

Everyone knew the situation he had walked into, he said, as he attempted to place the proverbial 12-foot barge pole between himself and any responsibility for County’s dire predicament.

Well, let’s examine that situation, shall we? When Malky Mackay was somewhat surprisingly sacked in mid-November, County were nevertheless 11th in the table and on a dire run of nine games without victory. They were only above Livingston on goal difference, so Adams can rightly point to the six-point gap that now exists between the sides as an improvement in their circumstances.

The flip side of that coin though is that County won just two of his 12 games in charge, and are currently - once again - on a run of nine matches without a win, culminating in their humiliation at Fir Park.

They were embarrassed by Partick Thistle in the Scottish Cup at home as the Jags took lusty revenge for the play-off heartache imposed upon them last season, while the teams above County are starting to disappear over the horizon.

The win for Motherwell pulls them six points clear of County, while St Johnstone are the closest side to the play-off spot, but still hold a five-point advantage over the Staggies.

His hastily assembled hotch-potch of players - many of them drawn from the English lower leagues - being torn asunder in Lanarkshire was the perfect riposte to his criticism of the standard in the Premiership, and you had the feeling as he stood forlornly in his technical area on Tuesday it may finally have dawned on him that he had grossly underestimated the level.

A penny for his thoughts as Blair Spittal curled a stupendous 25-yarder into the County postage stamp for Motherwell’s fourth. Morecambe must have some squad if they have players 100 times better than him.

Who knows? If he keeps up this sort of form then the big dream move to League Two in the summer might well be on. I think, if he sticks in, he may well be able to handle the step up.

I am being hugely facetious, of course, but only to illustrate a point about how ludicrous Adams’ comments about the standard of the Scottish game were. And he never really recovered from them.

There was a grain of truth in there about the lack of quality on display in some matches, yes. As is the case in every league. But one can only imagine he had cause to revise his opinion as he watched his team being pulled apart by the outfit sitting – at that point – in 10th place in the table.

Fair play to the 57 County fans who made the long trip down from Dingwall on a freezing Tuesday night and paid a fortune to sit on a bucket seat through 90-plus minutes of absolute dross from their team.

Fans of provincial clubs don’t ask much from their heroes, and they expect little in the way of success. What are non-negotiables though are the exhibition of fight, heart, and a willingness from the players to run themselves into the ground.

The hugely concerning thing for them during the week was not that their team were outplayed, but that they didn’t put up so much as a token resistance in what was their biggest match of the season so far.

Players didn’t go with runners. They didn’t bother to get close to the man on the ball. The men in claret and amber had the run of the place, and the fact that it ended in ‘just’ a 5-0 defeat actually painted this County display in a more favourable light than it deserved.

READ MORE: Motherwell 5 Ross County 0: Bair continues scoring run in rout

It was abysmal stuff, and the sort of performance that screamed out that the players were simply not playing for their manager.

I don’t know Adams personally, and it would be harsh to judge him on his often jaw-dropping post-match ponderings alone. Away from the cameras, he might well be the most affable man you could meet.

But what we can judge is the most important thing – what his team produces for him on the field. And the evidence was damning.

They have Rangers away next midweek, then a trip to Dundee before a home game against bottom side Livingston. County chairman McGregor cannot be blamed for cutting his losses at this point and drawing a line under what proved to be an unmitigated disaster.

I will say this for Adams. At least he resigned. That was the first semblance of an admission, of sorts, that he was in some way responsible for this entire mess.