Thursday 2nd May, 2013 at 9:49pm
Season 2012-2013 was unquestionably a memorable one for the Club. The season’s finale, a 0-0 draw at Dumbarton, was less memorable. To be fair to both sets of players, however, the strong wind was always going to make things very difficult.
Said manager Alan Archibald when speaking to [link:HOME] after the game;
“It was horrendous. I’m not sure how bad it was in the stand but even when I went out for the warm up I hadn’t realised just how bad it was. Everyone says that wind is one thing that games should be called off for; it ruins football. It ruins it as a spectacle. It was like being back at Arbroath at times with their wind machine! You wouldn’t expect to get that at the start of May and it ruined the game which was a bit flat anyway with it being an end of season affair.”
So was 0-0 the right score at the end?
“It probably was. They had a couple of half chances and they had one cleared off the line as well when Conrad did well. We had a couple of good chances to score as well so I think 0-0 was a fair result.”
The manager was happy with the contribution made by young defender Liam Lindsay who played the full 90 minutes in his Thistle debut.
“He did well. They are awkward customers and Dumbarton caused us a lot of problems the last time we played them away from home. One of the front two from that game was playing today and Liam was up against a couple of experienced strikers. I thought that he did well and settled down after the first ten minutes. He deserved his chance today to go and play. He’s progressed really well through the season and I’ve played with him in a couple of reserve games as well. Even when he came into the reserves at the end of last season he slotted in well and grew in confidence and hopefully playing today will help him next season as well.”
Alan continued;
“It was good too to give Jordan Leyden his chance in the second half and it was just unfortunate that we couldn’t bring David Wilson on as well. We want to keep Ross Forbes and Stuart Bannigan on in the midfield and I brought on Chris Erskine on just to try and nick the win. David though will get his chance if he keeps his head down and keeps working hard.”
There was a warm reception for Chris from the Thistle fans in his final appearance for the Club and there was praise too from his manager.
“Apart from winning us games with some sublime bits of skill Chris’ work rate, which often goes unnoticed, has been brilliant.”
Replacing him will be no easy task. Said Alan;
“What it does do is give someone the chance from our own team to step up to the mark or we will need to go and get someone from elsewhere to come in and do that for us.”
So what are Alan’s plans now?
“I’m going to go away with the players for one or two days; that’s enough. I’ll be on the plane with them and that will be as much as I will see of them. I’ll have a family holiday as well but the hard work starts now. In truth the hard work started two weeks ago when we won promotion. That’s when it all kicked off and we started doing stuff. You are scared to plan too far in advance in case you don’t win the league so when we did clinch the title that gave us the chance to get pre-season plans in place.”
Without mentioning names does Alan have a few players in mind to bring to the Club over the summer?
“We’ve got one or two in mind. It’s quite hard at the moment; the SPL for example hasn’t finished yet and people are waiting to see what is going to happen. It’s a bit of a waiting game at the moment to be honest. We’re Glasgow based and with the fan base that we have hopefully Partick Thistle is a more attractive club for people. Hopefully we will be able to bring in a better class of player to help those that we’ve already got and help us to progress even further.”
