Saturday 1st November, 2014 at 10:06am
After the massive disappointment of Wednesday night the Jags are looking to bounce straight back with a win against high flyers Hamilton. Archie knows it won’t be an easy task but is certain that, if his player play to the best of their ability, they are more than capable of coming away with the win.
“It is very important that the players take Saturday as an opportunity to move on from Wednesday. We had to address it and we did that on Thursday. We looked at the video and talked about what went wrong but, as soon as we finished with that, we made it clear to the players that we needed to move on and that is how it will be come Saturday.
“Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t trying to forget about it or brush it under the carpet. We were extremely disappointed with the result and, more importantly, the performance on Wednesday. As a group we let down the terrific fans that came to support us and we need to start paying them back come Saturday. It’s times like this that the team needs to show a bit of character and bounce back, I know they’ve got it in them so will be expecting to see it come kick off on Saturday.
Last time we played Hamilton we lost two very late goals and ended up with nothing. However, the positives to take from that were that, until the last five minutes, we had matched them and played well, something Archibald knows his team is capable of again.
“Since we played them Hamilton have been outstanding – you really have to take your hats off to them. I think the key to getting a result against them is working as hard as them and that’s no mean feat. They are an incredibly hard working side and that is where a lot of their results so far this season have come from.
“They have been full of confidence recently but, at the same time, they’ve had a couple of results not quite go their way in the last couple of weeks. We’ve looked at how other teams have got some joy against them and we’ll be using that to our advantage to try and get a positive result against them on Saturday.
“There’s no doubt it will be a tough game but we just have to concentrate on our own play and stick together as a team. If we look out for each other and play together as a unit like we know we can, there’s no doubt we can get some joy against them.
Kallum Higginbotham made an appearance against Celtic and will be in the squad come Saturday. Alan gave us an idea of how Kallum and the rest of the squad were shaping up.
“Higginbotham obviously got 20 minutes on Wednesday and will be in the squad for Saturday. We’ll assess him on Saturday morning and judge from there exactly what role he will play. We picked up a couple of knocks on Wednesday as well, Elliott and O’Donnell are both struggling, so we’ll see how they are before the game.”
Stuart Bannigan will also be available to the manager for selection as a result of the club challenging the red card that he picked up in Wednesday night’s game.
