Wednesday 12th August, 2015 at 2:23pm
Thistle take on Inverness and manager Alan Archibald is keen to get his season up and running after a tough start.
“Our season hasn’t really kicked off offensively. We went down to 10 men early on against Hamilton and never really created much. Celtic dominated the whole 90 minutes, creatively we didn’t get in the game. The match against Inverness on Wednesday gives us a chance to get our season up and running and hopefully get a victory.”
Thistle have enjoyed a good record in the highland capital recently but the manager isn’t taking anything for granted.
“It’s a hard place to go. We were lucky enough to record a very good win there last season but we know how good a side they are. They won the Scottish Cup last season having beaten us on the way. I know they have a few injuries but, when I went to watch them on Saturday, it wasn’t evident as they dominated the first hour of the game.
“We’ve saved some of our best performances for games against Inverness and they were good games of football to boot. They were better against us in the cup game so it’s been very even between the sides. It makes a difference when you have two good teams trying to play football and I expect that to be the case on Wednesday night.”
Frederic Frans returns from suspension and has given the gaffer a selection headache.
“It’s good to have Freddie back. It was a bad start to his season, getting sent off, and him coming back gives us another option. The two young lads have done really well against Celtic even though we lost two goals. I thought, given what they had to deal with, they did ever so well. It gives us a nice complement of four very good centre halves.”
The manager is still on the hunt for an extra creative player to help the squad push on a bit further.
“We’re still looking to strengthen with a creative, attacking player. From a creative point we did well in pre-season but we haven’t had the chance to get that going. Hopefully on Wednesday we can get our creative players on the ball. We’ve got a bit of work to do before adding anyone else in.”
It’s not quite a full squad for the manager to pick from on Wednesday night as he revealed to us.
“Christie is away for a scan with an injury but Mathias Pogba is in contention for a start and Dan Seaborne isn’t far away either. Steven Lawless has a knock, which is why he was substituted on Sunday and we’ll continue to assess him in the run up to the game – we’ll give him every chance.”
