Peterhead defender Mick Dunlop reckons the Blue Toon’s bonus-point win over Caley Thistle opens up their chances of qualification from their Betfred Cup group.
The Balmoor men sit on five points from two games and face two away games – at Dundee on Saturday and Raith Rovers on Tuesday – to try to seal their progress.
When the competition was reorganised in 2016 and group stages brought in, Peterhead qualified from a group that included Dundee courtesy of a penalty shootout win over Dumbarton in their final game.
Similar circumstances this time around could give them their first knockout tie in the competition in three years.
Dunlop said: “It puts us in a great position. That’s five points from two matches. We’ve got two hard matches – away to Dundee and then away to Raith next Tuesday – so we’ll see how it goes. We’ve put ourselves in a good position.
“It’ll be the exact same gameplan on Saturday, the only difference is we’ll be away from home and Tuesday night we were at home. But we’ll see what happens and give it our best.”
Dunlop returned to the side on Tuesday night and came close to scoring twice, forcing one superb save out of Mark Ridgers and hitting the crossbar with his next attempt. It was amid a period of concerted pressure from the home side as they eventually won 11-10 on penalties.
He added: “The goalie made a great save for the first one and the second one was hitting the bar anyway, but he’s got a touch on it.
“I’ve not been involved in one that’s gone on that long before and I was thinking ‘oh no, I’m going to have to take a penalty here.’ I think we deserved to win in normal time. They were the better side in the first half without creating too much. We were good defensively.
“In the second half our goalie has had a good save from the header and they hit the post, but we had some amount of chances and got into some great positions.
“We put pressure on them and had a lot of corners, so over the 90 minutes I felt we deserved to win. It was probably justice.”
