Saturday was disappointing.
We all knew that an away trip to Kilmarnock would be a tough game, even taking in our recent form there but the team were beaten by the better and more deserving side.
It was a fantastic chance for the club to distance themselves from the other teams at the bottom of the table. A win would have opened up a four point gap between Dundee and the bottom three. As all of us Dark Blue fans know, we never do things the way that we hope.
This defeat saw us slip to tenth, one point ahead of the bottom two. This league is incredibly tight and to show just how tight it is, during Saturday the Dee moved from 7th to 6th, back to 7th, to 8th then 9th and lastly 10th. Every single club is in the mix at the moment but it won’t be long before we see teams pulling away and others starting to really struggle.
It’s certainly not all doom and gloom though. Nine points from a potential fifteen is a fantastic return from a team who had just gone six matches without gaining a single point. There was a general fear within some of the support and I include myself in this, that we were on the verge of being caught adrift. Result’s picked up, performances improved and we moved up the table and for a fleeting moment before kick off on Saturday, we were sitting in the top six on goal difference due to a last minute winner from Celtic at Motherwell in the early kick off game.
If we had won, we would be sitting all pretty in sixth place with a two point gap on seventh. If my Auntie had balls and all that springs to mind though!
With the winter break making a comeback in Scottish Football this season, we have five huge matches to try and pick up as many points as possible before we take three weeks off. There will be nothing worse than finishing up on Hogmanay in either the play off or relegation spot so the team have to go out and show that the results and performances from the end of October and all of November wasn’t merely a ‘flash in the pan’.
The first team we face out of the five are Ross County at Dens Park this Saturday.
We beat the highlanders 3-1 in the first game of the season and they currently sit a point better off than ourselves. Last year our speciality was drawing games but County seem to have taken up that role from us this season with seven from sixteen games played.
As of late, they have struggled in the league. Out of the last three defeats in their last five games, they have conceded FOUR in all of them. With our team not exactly proving to be prolific up front at the moment, if we come out flying at the kick off, hopefully we can take advantage of County’s leaky defence. The hope will lie on Craig Wighton and Marcus Haber’s shoulders who continue to impress as a pairing up front, to knock in a few for our third home win on the trot.
My head is telling me that this game has a draw all over it. Even seeing some of County’s heavy defeats on television, they still look like a team that can create chances but have only struggled to put them away. There is no denying that they have threats in their attack.
Six out of the bottom seven teams are squaring off against each another and Partick Thistle will face Celtic in the Friday night match so just like last week, Dundee have the chance to put points between us and them. Our next two games happen to be against the top two teams in this league so we must get a result this weekend.
I know my head tells me that this will end in a draw but we must go out and win this game!
MON THE DEE!
