Cove Rangers boss Paul Hartley felt his team showed a different side to themselves to dig out a result against Partick Thistle.
Mitch Megginson scored the only goal of the game to give Cove their first win of 2023 and their first clean sheet on the road this season.
It was a scrappy and ugly contest at times at Firhill against Partick, who had Brian Graham sent off, and Cove goalkeeper Scott Fox was in fine form.
After the recent run of results and the goals they had been conceding, three points and a clean sheet is a huge fillip.
FT | PTFC 0-1 CRFC
That's more like it!! A big three points on the road!#CRFCLive pic.twitter.com/nKMR0O4dSz
— Cove Rangers FC (@CoveRangersFC) February 4, 2023
“It was a hard-fought game and we showed a different side to ourselves,” said Hartley. “We’re in transition, with bringing eight players in and eight going, so it was going to take a bit of time.
“But in this league you don’t get time. I felt the team were outstanding to a man. The keeper was absolutely brilliant and we had to weather the storm.
“We’ve been conceding far too many goals, as everybody knows, but we’ve done a lot of work on that and we’ll continue to work on it.
“If I can get the team really settled – I still feel we’re one or two short. We had a young bench today and they’re not used to being in the trenches.
“I tried to go with my most experienced team today. I felt we’d been conceding too many and we were really solid.”
While Fox was impressive between the posts, the performance of Cieran Dunne also caught the eye.
His pace and dribbling ability has never been in doubt but what has tripped him up has been his lack of an end product.
On Saturday Dunne set up Megginson’s goal and was a persistent threat down the Cove left.
“I had Dunney when I was at Falkirk when he was 17 and that was always the issue,” said Hartley.
“He’s got blistering pace but you’ve got to have an end product with that. He managed to do that on Saturday.
“There’s still a couple of situations where he could have done better but we’ll keep working with players. (Luis) Longstaff had a good game and he’s not shown the player I know he can be.
“What I saw from the team today was that they will roll their sleeves up and say ‘this is what we need to do to stay in this league’.”