Saturday 17th March, 2018 at 7:26pm
Having battled to a well-earned point against Aberdeen seven days ago, Partick Thistle looked to continue their push for Premiership survival as they travelled to Tynecastle to take on Craig Levein’s Hearts. Unfortunately, much of the fight and dogged determination that the Jags displayed against the Dons last weekend was absent as they came to the capital and the Jambos ran out 3-0 winners with all the damage done in the opening 45 minutes. Kyle Lafferty opened the scoring for the home side on 16 minutes before the hosts doubled their lead through Steven Naismith five minutes later. A brilliant first half for the Edinburgh side was capped off by John Souttar who got on the end of a long throw-in to make it three with two minutes left until the interval. The loss leaves Thistle in 11th place, without a win in seven and with only three games left until the split. Jags manager, Alan Archibald spoke to ptfc.co.uk following the match.
Archie began by outlining his disappointment with the way his side played in the first half as they gave themselves a mountain to climb by falling two goals behind within 21 minutes.
“It’s supremely frustrating, especially after last Saturday when the guys showed that they do have that grit and fight in them. We weren’t anywhere near it for the first 25 minutes and even after that it wasn’t much better. By the time the lads woke up, the game was gone and you can’t afford to start slowly against anyone in this league.”
The gaffer then went on to tell what he thought were the factors that led to today’s convincing defeat.
“A lot of things went wrong for us today. We looked slow when going for second balls and Hearts were winning a lot of the 50/50s that came up. We knew they would be keen to put the derby loss behind them but we didn’t match their desire. The overall performance was poor but when you combine that with a string of silly errors, there’s only ever going to be one result.”
We then spoke to Alan about where the team goes from here with a string of difficult fixtures coming after the international break ahead of the league split.
“At the end of the day, we now have two weeks to fix the things that didn’t work today. There’s no doubt that we were nowhere near good enough this afternoon but we must not dwell on it as that won’t help us to improve. We have to use the break to regroup and prepare for three big games.”
The first of those three pre-split fixtures comes at Easter Road as Thistle’s next fixture is against Hibernian in two weeks time. Kick-off is 15:00 in Leith.
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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
