Partick Thistle Football Club

Football is all about highs and lows and it would be wrong to describe last night's game with Ayr United as anything other than a low point in a frustrating season. A second successive, undeserved, 1-0 defeat was bad enough but salt was rubbed into open Thistle wounds last night with Jackie McNamara picking up a bad injury. We will return to the game itself with manager Ian McCall here on www.ptfc.co.uk shortly but first of all he brought us an update on Jackie's injury and it isn't good news.

 "Jackie isn't the kind of player that goes to ground easily and we could tell at the time that it was a bad one and it has been confirmed that Jackie has broken his leg. He will see a specialist today to try and determine just how serious a leg break it is. A leg break is obviously a bad injury at the best of times and our hope is that it is nothing more than a break and that there isn't, and we don't think there is, any cruciate ligament damage into the bargain.  The best case scenario is that he will be fit for pre-season training at the end of June start of July. In the meantime we all wish Jackie, who was again excellent last night before being injured, all the best for a speedy recovery."

 Jackie's injury just compounded a miserable night that left all associated with Partick Thistle bitterly disappointed.

 "I think I managed about 30 minutes sleep last night with one thing or another going through my head. Bar the first 15 minutes and the last 15 minutes, when we adopted a bit of a gung-ho approach to the game, I thought that it was another match that we controlled. Against Queen of the South we had about six great chances to score and last night at Ayr we had about seven or eight great chances to score. You tend to believe that luck evens itself out over the course of a season but this season has taught us the hard way that this isn't the case."

 "I had the players in for a meeting this morning and I know people are going to think it a case of sour grapes or a case of us looking for excuses but we all feel that the players aren't getting their just rewards for their performances. We feel that we should have won last night, won at Queen of the South and were unlucky at Dundee a few weeks ago but we have lost all three games 1-0. Even in the short term that makes a big difference to your league position. In general this season we have played good football and last night some of the football we played at times was excellent. I don't think that the players look as if they are short of confidence but we can't put the ball in the net. When you create the number of chances that we have been doing you expect to be winning games and we share everyone's sense of frustration that we aren't doing so. At times last night we were shooting when we shouldn't have been and not shooting when we had the chance to do so. "

 "When we lost players of the calibre of Gary Harkins and Marc Twaddle last summer I must be honest and say that I didn't think that we would win the league this season but what came out of our meeting this morning was the real sense that we have missed an opportunity this season. I've been in football for a long time and you learn to trust what your experience tells me. I believe, and still believe despite recent results, that we have a better team right now than we did at this point last year."

 "As down as we are right now we continue to strive and move this football club forward. In the short term the players were in today and will have a double session tomorrow before having the weekend off. We then all be in again on Monday prepared to work hard towards winning a football match against Morton a week on Saturday."