Tuesday 19th September, 2017 at 10:05am
A six game winless league run may lead you to believe that there’s not much confidence in the Partick Thistle camp. However, there’s plenty to be excited about for the Jags. They picked up their first point of the season two weeks ago in a tough fixture away to Ross County then a week later they got a draw against Rangers for the first time in the league since 1995. Now they have another meeting with Rangers on the horizon, this time in the Betfred Cup. A quarter-final clash with the Gers means a win over the city rivals and Thistle would be going to Hampden for the first time in over a decade. Jags’ midfielder, Adam Barton, spoke with ptfc.co.uk to preview the game.
Adam made it clear that the squad knows it wlll be a different game tonight and that just because they got a draw on Friday, that means nothing going into the cup meeting.
“Everyone is looking forward to the game and the boys are desperate to get to Hampden which is a great incentive. It’s a unique situation in that we’re playing the same team twice in five days but we’re prepared. It means we have a lot of interesting choices to make tactically and we know Rangers will be looking to get one over on us after Friday.”
Miles Storey is cup-tied for this evening’s game and Chris Erskine is suspended but that just means that Thistle will be mixing it up in the attacking areas and giving Rangers a different problem to that of the previous meeting.
“Obviously, we’ll miss those two but we have personnel that can step in and we trust them to do the job. We have guys like Kris Doolan and Steven Lawless who can come in and we know what they can do. On the flip side, with Rangers, they’re still trying to figure out their best set-up after signing so many players this summer and we want to exploit that.”
With victory very much in the mind of the players going into the game, Adam feels that the team’s ability to hold out for a draw saw them overcome a mental barrier that they failed to last season.
“It was, of course, one of our big problems last year. We weren’t mentally strong late on and tended to drop deeper and deeper late in games and it cost us a lot of points and we’ve lost a couple of late goals this season too. However, to defend as well as we did for the last ten minutes of the Friday night game was a huge confidence booster for the team.”
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