Saturday 27th February, 2016 at 1:56pm
Thistle are busy preparing for another tough Ladbrokes Premiership game, just a few days after a Firhill success against St Johnstone. Ptfc.co.uk caught up with manager Alan Archibald to get his views on another vitally important game.
“Tuesday night’s win against St Johnstone was a great platform for us. We’d been sidelined for a couple of weeks due to the weather and everyone in the ground could see that the players were desperate for a game. They got stronger as the match wore on and we grabbed a couple of great goals to seal the three points.
“That game is in the past now and we’re all focused on the challenge of Motherwell tomorrow. We only played them a couple of weeks ago in a game that was very, very close. I think we just about edged it and deserved to claim the three points when Steven Lawless scored in injury time. Motherwell will be keen to get revenge for that defeat, which I think was a very sore from their point of view.”
Thistle haven’t had a win at Fir Park since January 1996 and Alan is confident his side have the quality to break another hoodoo.
“Since we’ve come up to the Premiership we’ve broken a number of lengthy droughts in terms of away games and we’re hoping Fir Park is the next hoodoo to fall. The players have done it before and they’ll do it again. In order to beat Motherwell tomorrow we’ll have to be at our best. They are a side with a lot of quality players who have a tremendous amount of experience.
“We know if we win that we will move five points ahead of them, with games in hand over them, which would be a great position to put ourselves in. We’d have a bit of breathing space over the sides below us and there would be an opportunity for us to look further up the table rather than over our shoulders. We’re aware that Motherwell will overtake us with a win and that will fire them up to keep the three points at Fir Park.”
Thistle face a grueling spell of games in the near future and Alan knows he’ll have to utilise all his squad to get through all the matches.
“We’ve now got a squad with quality all through it. We had a spell where we had to put youngsters on the bench, but now we can fill it with experienced first team players. We’ll have to use all of our squad to get through the busy period ahead. The players who were selected on Tuesday played really well but it’s great to have options as we know there will be an element of rotation over the next few weeks.”
Finally we concluded with team news ahead of tomorrow’s match.
“Other than Dumbuya we have pretty much a full strength team. Muzzy is still struggling and we just need to be patient with him. Lawless had a stiff back after Tuesday night and Gary Miller took a knock to his knee but both should be OK for Saturday.”
