Thursday 22nd December, 2016 at 6:12pm
With Storm Barbara bearing down on the north of Scotland ahead of Thistle’s clash with Ross County on Friday night Alan Archibald wasn’t letting the weather take his focus off a very important match for his team. The Thistle gaffer spoke to ptfc.co.uk ahead of the clash and started off by commenting on the conditions.
“As far as we’re concerned the game is on as scheduled, I don’t think the pitch will be a worry it’s just the forecasted conditions for travelling up that will be the issue but the weather changes all the time so we just need to plan that the game is on and go from there. I hope it is because we’re hungry to get a win after a couple of good performances that didn’t lead to the results we would have liked.
“We’ve made it up there before and had the game called off so I just hope we can get it on. We’ll stay in touch during the journey and see what happens. In terms of how it affects your play it does make it more difficult for the keeper and the defenders but it’s the same for both sides so we’ll just need to approach it on the night and see what happens.”
With the games coming thick and fast, Archie insists that no matter what the conditions, his team will be ready and raring to go come kick off on Friday night.
“We’re good to go and we don’t have any suspensions or new injuries so we’re looking forward to it. For all we lost against Celtic the other night the boys took a lot of positives from it and are really set to take those into the next match.”
Thistle went to Celtic Park and created probably as many chances as any side has done there so far this season and following on from Tynecastle last weekend there is certainly no shortage of creative threat in red and yellow. That being said, Archibald knows his side have to start taking chances and really putting teams to the sword if they are to start moving up the table.
“We’ve been creating chances and I’d be much more worried if that wasn’t the case. We’ve not had much luck recently but we need to keep being positive and ensure that changes sooner rather than later. I would much rather we were playing well and missing chances than playing badly and not creating them. If we keep playing like we have been the breaks will come but it has certainly been frustrating in the meantime.
“We’ve spoken to the boys through the week and we’ll put the disappointment of not taking something from Tuesday night and we are now entirely focussed on Friday night. It’s a good opportunity for us and we need to be taking points from these games against the teams around us.”
