Saturday 4th August, 2012 at 8:46pm
Cup ties away to sides from a lower division always have the potential to be tricky. This afternoon’s trip to Second Division Forfar Athletic certainly came under that heading. With a victory against First Division opposition already under their belts confidence in the home side ranks would have been high.
It was too Thistle’s credit, therefore, that a passage into the next round was safely negotiated with the minimum of fuss even allowing for the fact that Thistle played just over half the game with just ten men following the sending off of Hugh Murray.
It was a happy and contented Jackie McNamara then that [link:HOME] spoke to after the game.
“I thought that Forfar started the game well but apart from that brief period I felt that we were much the better side throughout the game and we could have scored a few more goals, we certainly created enough chances to score a few more goals.”
“In the first half especially the football that we played was excellent. We played with real pace and Forfar simply didn’t know how to handle us at times.”
The artificial pitch at Alloa last week had been the subject of some attention and although we were back on the plastic this afternoon the manager felt that the surface at Forfar suited Thistle much better.
“That pitch was much closer to what we train on and I think that you could see that the ball flowed much better today than it did at Alloa last week. There the ball was tending to stick under players feet but that wasn’t the case today.”
The only real moment of anxiety came just before half-time when Hugh Murray was sent off in an incident that gave Forfar a penalty and a route back into the match.
“I’ll need to have a look at the sending off. It was a relief that the penalty was missed. Had they scored at that point then Forfar would have got a big lift. As it was we produced a really solid second half performance. The effort and desire shown by the players was first class and I was delighted that Scott Fox kept a clean sheet. Even down to ten men I felt that with the way that Forfar were set up that we would continue to create chances, and we did that and on another day we could have scored a few more goals.”
