Replacing Liverpool loanee Owen Beck at left back looked like one of Tony Docherty’s toughest jobs this summer.
But in snapping up Ziyad Larkeche from Queen’s Park Rangers, the Dundee boss has made it look easy.
It has taken the Frenchman a few months to properly settle into his role at Dens Park and who could grudge him that?
He’s a young guy in a foreign country, on loan from a parent club who have sent him out despite making 22 appearances last season – 20 of them in the Championship.
You could understand if he started the season feeling uncertain about his position at QPR and where his future may lie.
When he was stretchered off against Hearts in the second game of the season, things seemed pretty ominous.
Fortunately, he was back in action within a week.
And any tentativeness he may have felt in the early days at Dens looks well and truly behind him now.
The 22-year-old’s last gasp winning goal against Kilmarnock was his third of the season – and the most important yet.
Week after week, he is proving himself a relentless runner, and popping up to knock home that weekend-altering winner in the 95th minute says everything about him.
He’s a proper athlete, like all the top full back, or wing backs, are these days..
That’s clearly what you need to survive an upbringing in the game with PSG.
That determination to keep going until the end says something about Dundee as a whole too.
When they fell 2-0 behind to Killie, a team more than capable of squeezing the life out of a game, the slightest slackening off of effort would have handed the game to Derek McInnes’ side.
Instead, they put the pedal to the metal and pulled a goal back instantly.
And after the break, it was all about Dundee pushing for an equaliser, then the winner.
The fact that they went for the winner is huge too because, again, having pulled it back to 2-2, the easy option is to see it as ‘job done’.
There was none of that from Dundee at the weekend.
There can be absolutely no doubting Tony Docherty’s team’s character and Larkeche is the poster boy for that.
If they can just keep the back door shut, this season could yet be a thriller.
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