Defender Mark Reynolds insists completing the set by beating every team in League One this season is a secondary concern for Cove Rangers.
Queen’s Park are the only side the Aberdeen outfit haven’t defeated this term going into Sunday’s clash in Glasgow.
However, leaders Cove – five points clear at the summit with five games to go – are only focused on collecting maximum points week-to-week during the title run-in.
Reynolds said: “We go into every game confident we can win, but – especially at this time of the season, when everyone’s got their own story, objectives to achieve and need to win for different reasons – every game becomes a cup final.
“It would be nice to go and get the three points with the history over the course of the season. But we’re only really looking forward now and trying to chalk up three points every week and beat what’s put in front of us.”
Cove and fourth-placed Queen’s Park have drawn in their two Balmoral Stadium meetings this term, while Cove’s last trip to face the play-off-chasing Spiders in the Central Belt – all the way back in August – ended in defeat.
For long-unbeaten Cove, racking up another victory in their drive towards the League One crown this weekend is likely to be more challenging due to the much-maligned pitch at Firhill – which is currently being used by both landlords Partick Thistle and Queen’s Park.
It will be used twice this weekend, too, as Partick are set to play Arbroath on it in the Championship 24 hours before Queen’s Park and Cove clash in the division below.
Paul Hartley’s Cove, who’ve progressed up the pyramid in recent years while playing attractive football with the ball on the deck, and are used to a flawless artificial surface at the Balmoral, may need to adapt their game.
For Reynolds, it’s a normal challenge of lower-league football, and he added: “We will probably have to change the way we play, but you get pitches like that – that are shocking.
“But it’s more of a hindrance for them, as a team who also want to play football, having to play on it every home game.
“Every week, the opposition, the ground – or whatever it is – presents different challenges, and trying to play on the pitch is going to be one of the main challenges, but there’s ways to do it. Teams have went there and been successful with how they’ve done it.
“We’ll go down there and we’ve certainly got players who can adapt and change how we need to play. Hopefully we can find a game plan and a formula that will get us the three points.”
‘The 11 of us on the pitch all ran off as if we’d scored ourselves’
Former Aberdeen centre-half Reynolds made the latest step in his transition to part-time football this week, beginning a full-time job as a mechanical engineer with firm Katoni.
However, before that was the drama of last Saturday, when Fraser Fyvie’s last-gasp long-range volley secured a 1-1 draw for Cove at second-placed Airdrionians.
Veteran Reynolds thinks, with its context in the League One title race, in a game where their closest challengers led for so long, it could be one of the most important goals he’s experienced in his career.
He said: “You’re thinking it’s just going to be one of the days where nothing’s going to drop for us and then the ball drops to Fyvie and he’s caught it absolutely perfectly and sent the place into raptures.
“We said after the game, if you never seen the goal, you wouldn’t know who’d scored it. The 11 of us on the pitch all ran off as if we’d scored ourselves. It was perfect.
“We’re just taking it one game at a time, but that was a huge game, because if the result had stayed the same (and Airdrie won), the gap gets cut on second. Then there’s a shift in the momentum and a shift in the narrative getting painted in the paper and stuff, which would be: ‘the gaps getting cut, it’s getting closer, it’s getting nervy’.
“So I think to get that goal, keep it at a five-point cushion and chalk another game off with just five games left keeps us in a good place.”