Saturday 20th October, 2018 at 7:48pm
New Partick Thistle manager, Gary Caldwell took charge of his first Jags match earlier today as the Maryhill men travelled to the Indodrill Stadium to take on Alloa Athletic. Unfortunately for the new boss, Caldwell his side couldn’t get the desired result from the Wasps as Jim Goodwin’s team came away with the 1-0 win. A single Dario Zanatta goal in the second half proved the difference in the sides with Thistle unable to break down their hosts despite having plenty of the ball. Following the conclusion of his first game as Jags manager, Gary spoke to ptfc.co.uk:
“Obviously, the result isn’t the one we wanted but I felt there were aspects of the game to be positive about. Some of the stuff we worked on in training was being used on the park so that was encouraging but there’s also still plenty to work on.
“The margins are very fine in football and you’ve got to be on the right side of the margins if you want to win football matches. Now, we’ll get back into training and work very hard on improving the areas we struggled with today.”
The new gaffer felt that his team performed well in spells but need to make little improvements if they want to produce more complete showings.
“The defence looked very solid for most of the game; they were compact and that gave us a good platform on which to build. We controlled the majority of the game but we didn’t hurt Alloa anywhere near enough.
“We’re still developing an understanding of how I want this team to attack. Our positional play needs to be better and we need a better final pass. Also, the decision-making was sometimes a bit rash.”
Although his side were unable to take any points, Gary was pleased with the effort and application of his players.
“We did well to take control of the game after 15 minutes and we got ourselves back into the game after the goal too. There were five minutes where we were on the ropes a little but we got ourselves back into it.
“I was happy with the reaction and we were on the front foot for the last 25 minutes. We gambled with the substitutes because we knew we had to get back into things but unfortunately we couldn’t get anything.
“I couldn’t have asked for much more in terms of what they gave to the game. We couldn’t get a goal but it wasn’t for a lack of trying and hopefully they carry that effort into training this week.”
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Article Copyright © 2018. Permission to use quotations from this article online is only granted subject to appropriate source credit and hyperlink to ptfc.co.uk.
