John Rankin is confident that Dundee United’s upward momentum will have been interrupted rather than halted or reversed by their midweek defeat to Partick Thistle.
The Tangerines blew the chance to get themselves to within just two points of second bottom Kilmarnock on the back of a morale-boosting 10-man defeat of bogey side St Johnstone at the weekend.
With Hamilton Accies in freefall, there was even talk of dragging them into the relegation mix as well.
Tuesday night was another punch in the stomach for United and their near 2,000 travelling fans, though, as utter dominance in the first half at Firhill was all for nought.
After being in the unusual position for a couple of days of being able to say their survival hopes were “in their own hands”, they will go into Saturday’s clash with Inverness Caledonian Thistle knowing other teams need to help them out again and a couple of wins for Killie, in particular, could kill those hopes off.
Rankin insisted, however, that United are still a team on the march, dismissing the suggestion that the Partick game was a momentum shifter.
“No,” he said. “Not at all.
“It might look that way on paper when it says won one and lost one, but what we’ve got in the dressing room now is a belief that we are going to get out of it. We need to maintain that.
“This is a major setback and there’s still five points in it. It’s out of our hands and we are relying on other teams to do us favours, but we need to keep believing and keep digging.
“We have another massive game on Saturday and we will dust ourselves down and be ready to go again.
“We know ourselves that we won’t win every game. There will come a time that the teams above us will win games too.
“We have to try not to get too disappointed. We merited more than that out of the Partick game. At times we were very exciting to watch too, but for us as players it’s extremely disappointing coming off the park at the end of the day knowing you have lost three points.”
Rankin isn’t kidding himself that time is on their side. Games, and opportunities, are running out. Partick was a golden one passed up.
“Obviously,” he said. “When you get to this stage of the season and there’s one less game and you’ve lost three points.
“We were looking at the table thinking we always had this game in hand and when was it coming. But that game has gone now.
“We’re even with everyone else and we’ve played the same amount of games. There’s six games left so yes we are running out of time because the gap is five points.
“But there’s a chance and we’ll not give up.
“We’ve had two unbelievable away followings – on Saturday we filled two stands and we filled the main stand at Firhill.
“If we can get a similar backing at home then it would be great for us because we need all the help we can get.”
From now on United only have bottom six teams to face. The Kilmarnock match will be viewed as the most significant one for obvious reasons but Rankin doesn’t have any preferences about when the head to head with Killie is scheduled after the split.
“It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I’d play any team any time after the split. We know what we need to do.
“When we play our games we have to win the majority of them. It doesn’t matter if Killie are last, first or in the middle.
“It could change, Killie could win a couple of games and it could be Hamilton or whoever else is above us.
“We’ve got no direct target, we just need to concentrate on ourselves. There’s no point looking at anyone else’s results, we’ve just got to concentrate on ourselves.”
Nor has Rankin set a points target.
“I’ve not worked it out,” he said. “We need as many points on the board as possible. There are six games left and you are looking at us needing to put a run together.
“I don’t think we have put a run together of more than two games and we need to do that now. Everyone needs to stand up and be counted. There are characters in the dressing room and they all need to stand up and show responsibility.”
Kilmarnock’s form has improved of late, with their defeat to Celtic and draw to Thistle widely perceived to be harsh on Lee Clark’s men.
Rankin doesn’t expect them to stand still.
He pointed out: “We’ve said that. They are going to win at some stage, Hamilton as well.
“We can’t get too disappointed, we just need to knuckle down until someone tells us we can’t. This defeat was a bitter pill to follow, but we need to go again on Saturday.”
He added: “We’re still convinced we will stay up. Look at our first half performance.
“Why would you not be convinced when you look at the amount of chances we created? We probably didn’t work the keeper as much as we should have done, but we’ve had double figure chances. Thistle got one chance and scored it.
“Defensively, we feel aggrieved because we conceded a goal from one shot. But the amount of chances we created is a positive, and we can kick on from there. That’s the heartening thing.
“If we can take half of our chances in the next game, we will score a few goals.
“It’s not about playing pretty football now because it’s the business end of the season and we are bottom of the league and we need to do whatever it takes to get out of it.”