Monday 7th March, 2022 at 3:16pm
Partick Thistle play their latest game in hand on Tuesday night as they welcome in-form Queen of the South to Firhill on cinch Championship action. After a narrow Friday night win against Inverness Caledonian Thistle, the Jags sit in third position in the table with ten games of the season remaining for Ian McCall’s side. Friday night’s match-winner Kevin Holt spoke to ptfc.co.uk as he looked ahead to the fourth encounter of the season with the Doonhamers.
“It felt great to hit the back of the net on Friday but we’re all focused on Tuesday night now. Ross Docherty is trying to claim it was a clever dummy to tee me up, but let’s be honest it was a complete fresh air kick which teed me up perfectly to drill the ball home. The most important thing from Friday was the three points. We now move onto a game we have in hand and wanting to take as much advantage of that as possible.”
Friday night’s win saw Thistle continue to rise up the standings and now occupy third place with games in hand over the teams above and below them in the league.
“Climbing the table adds confidence to the squad. We’ve been believing all season that we could be competing towards the top of the league, it’s where we want to be. We were stuck in fifth place for what seemed like ages due to our games in hand but the confidence never drained from the team. We hadn’t won in a little while but we had the belief that we’d get the wins again and keep contesting for it at the top of the league.
“I thought on Friday night we were good in the first half with Inverness becoming stronger in the second half but overall we deserved the win. We tried to keep playing and made a couple of mistakes at times but we believe in the way we can play and just have to find a way to win. We did that on Friday with a set piece and we’ll have to find different ways to win from now until the end of the season.”
Queen of the South have been on a strong run of form lately and Kevin knows just how tough a match it will be.
“I watched them on Saturday and Queen’s were good. They were clinical in the chances they took but have also got stronger at the back and deserved their three points. We’re confident on the back of Friday night but Queens will be confident from their recent run of form. They’ve improved under Wullie and have climbed off the bottom of the league when they looked like they were maybe going to be adrift a few weeks ago.
“It will be a tough game tomorrow night, we’ve had three really tough games against them so far this season so I expect it will be very much the same during the 90 minutes. They might be down the bottom of the league but that makes them very dangerous opponents as they look to make sure they stay in the Championship next season. We’ll have to put in as good a performance as we did on Friday, if not better, to make sure we get the three points we want.”
As the league enters its final furlong, Holt is excited to be challenging at the top end of the division and looking to finish the campaign on a high.
“We’re in the top half which is where you want to be – you would take the added pressure of challenging at the top rather than being down the bottom of the division fighting for survival. There is pressure on every side in the league – Arbroath and Kilmarnock had pressure on Saturday when we had won on Friday night but they handled it really well and picked up three points so it’s another game ticked off for them. For us, we need to just keep picking up three points and looking to see where it takes us by the end of April.”
Exclusive video interviews with Ross Docherty and Thistle assistant manager Neil Scally will be available for JagZone subscribers to watch today – log in to view.
JagZone subscribers will be able to tune in to live audio commentary for our clash with Queen of the South, starting at 7:15pm – click here to tune in.
We will be providing a pay-per-view option, priced at £12, for any supporter who wishes to watch our livestream of the match – click here for more info.
We’ll have extended highlights and a full game replay of the fixture on JagZone following the game.
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