Tuesday 2nd February, 2016 at 3:42pm
Ptfc.co.uk caught up with a happy Alan Archibald shortly after the full time whistle, with Thistle edging a close game by a late Steven Lawless goal.
“I’m thoroughly delighted with that. It was a game where both sides cancelled each other out for a lot of the game. I thought we started the game really well, creating a few opportunities, but not seriously testing their goalkeeper. The game was a bit of a slog in the middle but at the end we were able to nick the goal right at the death
“I thought it was going to take something scrappy, or a setpiece, to separate the sides. The ball has just dropped to Lawless and it’s taken a deflection to fire it past the goalkeeper. We’ll definitely take that, we had something similar against Inverness and hopefully we go on another winning run once again.”
Thistle’s groundstaff worked tirelessly all day long to get the pitch playable and Alan was keen to praise the hard work done behind the scenes.
“It’s great to get a win when there has been so much work done to put the game on. Allan Findlay was in at 7.30 this morning and has worked on the pitch all day to get the game ready to go ahead. Without him and his team of volunteers the pitch wouldn’t have been good enough to put the match on for us to get the three points, so it is good to get the win when some many people have put so much effort into getting the pitch into a good condition.”
Thistle fans certainly got into the swing of things during the 90 minutes brandishing their Johnathan Monk yellow cards enthusiastically, but Archibald found referee Barry Cook’s willingness to caution his players surprising.
“I didn’t think it was that bad a game in terms of fouls for the referee to issue yellows cards as much as he did. We went in at half time with four Thistle players booked and there wasn’t a horrific tackle in the game to that point.”
The league business takes a back seat at the weekend with Thistle heading to Tannadice on Scottish Cup duty looking to reach the quarter finals.
“We’ll take confidence out of tonight’s result going forward. The boys will have tomorrow off to recover and then on Thursday we’ll start planning for Dundee United and how we plan to keep our Hampden dream alive.”
