Saturday 2nd March, 2013 at 9:30pm
Manager Alan Archibald was an understandably a happy man when [link:HOME] spoke to him after yesterday’s emphatic 4-0 win at Dunfermline; the Thistle manager describing the performance as the “perfect away performance”.
Said Alan;
“If you want a perfect away performance then that was it. We got a fantastic start and we were absolutely delighted with that. That kind of start makes the game. In the Cowdenbeath game on Tuesday night we didn’t get out our own half in the first seven minutes and we spoke about that all week and I was delighted with the start that we made today.”
Alan continued;
“We knew the situation that Dunfermline are under and we knew that if we could get an early goal then we could go on and build upon that. They did respond well to the loss of the first goal and we knew that they would do. We had reports from their game the previous week and they did very well in the first half and I think today our second goal was really vital. We went on and built upon that as well and it was great that Stevie Craig went on to score a hat-trick.”
It wasn’t just the goals scored that pleased Alan;
“That’s three clean sheets out of four, taking away the Cowdenbeath game obviously, and we are delighted with that. That was one of the things that we spoke about at half-time; could we keep a clean sheet? Apart from the Cowdenbeath game the two centre backs have been outstanding and all over the pitch as a unit I thought we were outstanding today. It’s always a hard one when you come out for the second half when you have a comfortable lead. It is hard to keep the tempo up and that was the case today but the main thing for us second half was keeping the clean sheet. There is a pride about Scott Fox and the back four and they will tell you that they want to keep clean sheets. We had a wee phase a little earlier in the season where we hadn’t managed to keep a clean sheet since, I think, November. As a defender keeping clean sheets is your thing. Obviously the strikers want to score goals but you just want to keep a clean sheet.”
The four goal half-time lead allowed the manager to make some switches in personnel in the second half.
“It was always the plan to get them on. I thought James came on and did really well. He did well when he came on as a sub against Airdrie and hit the ground running when he came on and he did that today as well. With Steven Craig it was more a case of taking him off as he had been booked and it was good to give Kris Doolan some game time as well.”
The one down side about an otherwise excellent afternoon was the injury picked up by Stuart Bannigan and Alan was able to give us the latest on that.
“It’s not as bad as the one at Falkirk. His ankle blew up straight away and Kenny knew right away to get him off. Luckily we have no game this midweek so he has the full week to recover and come back for Saturday hopefully.”
