Partick Thistle Football Club

The full-time whistle at Firhill this evening produced one more the bitter sting of defeat and this time it was accompanied by an exit from the Co-Operative Insurance Cup. Whereas on Saturday, at Cappielow, we carried very little in the way of a threat in the final third of the park that wasn’t in all honesty the case tonight and when www.ptfc.co.uk spoke to manager Ian McCall after tonight’s game he was certainly of the opinion that we didn’t deserve to lose the match.

“Sometimes you don’t get what you deserve in football and tonight I thought we were terrific. There was a 10-15 minute spell after half-time where we dropped too deep and we fell out of the game a wee bit. Their goal during that spell was again very fortunate where they got the break of the ball. Conrad Balatoni knows he has made a mistake and he will learn from that.”

“I thought that we had been the better side in the first half and after losing that goal we camped in inside the Falkirk half for much of the rest of the game. The crowd got right behind the players and we completely dominated the match. We made numerous chances to score but just couldn’t get that goal.”

The feeling was that had we got the equaliser we deserved we would have been going into extra-time with the impetuous.

“We certainly looked a lot fitter than they did, I don’t think there is any doubt about that and the fact that the players are very, very fit.”

“I’ve a real realisation of just how important it was for us to win tonight and I would much rather have played badly and won the game and gone through to the next round. It’s just gutting to lose a game that we should have won. That’s us played both Dundee and Falkirk at Firhill this season and we have been the better team each time.”

“I thought that there were a lot of positives tonight. I thought Liam did well when he came on. I thought that Kris Doolan did well as did Simon Donnelly. I thought Rowson, Cairney and Hodge all did well and I felt that Chris Erskine did really well when he came on. The boys at the back did were excellent once more and I thought Paton did really well and Paddy Boyle was excellent again. I really didn’t think that we had any failures tonight. We stressed to the players that with the formation that we are playing that it is very important to get into goal scoring positions and we did that this evening. We got so many bodies in and around the box and had good chances. Paul Cairney’s shot and Willie Kinniburgh’s header that was cleared off the line immediately spring to mind.”

“In our next three games we have two at home and one, at Cowdenbeath on Saturday, away and we need to target three wins from these games. The Raith Rovers result was a little false but on Saturday we fell way below the standard we set against Dundee and again tonight against Falkirk and that is the standard we need to play at in the next three games. Indeed the standard we need to play at every week. If we can do that we will do okay. We will be a hard team to beat and we will win more games than we will lose.”