Paul Hartley watched his side rack up their third win in four games but could see room from improvement in the win over Inverness Caledonian Thistle at Dens.
The manager said, “I think we can play better. We were clinical, we had to defend a lot of balls into the box today.”
“I probably thought Inverness were better than us at times. We can play better but it just shows you, we have a certain way that we play now, it’s another home result for us which is the pleasing thing and we jump into joint 6th which is good also for the confidence.”
The league table is so tight that the win moved Dundee from the bottom to joint 6th, Paul continued, “We’re bottom at the start of the day then we jump up, it shows how tight the league is, we want to keep pushing on. We have a heavy schedule over the next month. We’ll need to use the whole squad. We understand players are going to be disappointed, the starting eleven at the moment are there on merit and they’ve got to keep fighting hard and working hard.”
Caley Thistle had a lot of shots from distance in the game as Dundee defence stood strong, “We blocked a lot of shots, we had to header the ball in the box but we let too many crosses into the box. That’s one thing I wasn’t happy with but it’s something we can work on.”
One of the defenders who put in another strong performance was Kosta Gadzhalov but not content with that the Bulgarian also grabbed what turned out to be the winner with his first goal of the season. The manager said, “He’s shown that once he’s in the team he aims to stay there. He’s been solid, as everybody else has been. The same starting line up again so I’m really pleased with that. We’ve got a great spirit amongst the players. I’ve never let their heads go down even though they’ve had their critics over the last two months, we’ve just got to keep working away and hopefully picking up points.”
The next few weeks see Dundee face teams around them in the table but the manager is just looking to next week’s match with Kilmarnock, “Just an old cliche, a game at a time. We’ll focus on the game next week. The players have worked really hard this week, they’ve been on astroturf for the majority of the week. We’ll get them going again next week and prepare for the Kilmarnock game.”
DeeTV subscribers can watch interviews with Paul Hartley and Craig Wighton on www.dundeefc.co.uk/deetv now.
