Ross County defender Paul Quinn has urged his team-mates to ensure the Staggies’ excellent burst of form does not count for nothing come the end of the season.
Attacker Craig Curran’s 33rd-minute header gave the Staggies a 1-0 win against 10-man Partick Thistle in a scrappy Scottish Premiership encounter at Victoria Park on Saturday.
The win was County’s fourth win in a row against Thistle, who had Kallum Higginbotham sent off midway through the second half.
The result gives County breathing space in 10th position, three points clear of bottom-placed St Mirren and just four behind Thistle in ninth.
The Dingwall men have given their survival hopes fresh impetus but Quinn knows there is still much work to be done.
Quinn said: “We are giving everything we’ve got for the manager because he kept believing in us. It’s also great for the supporters seeing a few points on the board. But we need to keep it going. There’s no point getting carried away and sitting down at the end of the season having been relegated and saying remember when we won four in a row. That’s pointless.
“Our job is to get enough points to stay in the league. But nothing has changed. We are working hard and being so positive in everything and I think things are just dropping for us now.
“We’ve still got to do the hardest job of staying in the division and that’s what we intend to do.”
Former Motherwell and Cardiff City defender Quinn says he never doubted the Staggies squad’s ability and reckons the last four games have gone some way to reversing their poor form earlier in the season, which saw them win just two out of 24 games prior to their recent winning streak.
The 29-year-old said: “We’ve not surprised ourselves. We are taking credit because we’ve won four in a row but really we are making up for the previous few months. There were a few games when I think we deserved better but now we are getting results and it’s breeding confidence. Individually and collectively performances are getting raised and each game now becomes more important.
“The crucial thing was after we took a 4-0 drubbing at Aberdeen, where I thought we played well for the first 45 minutes, in our next few games we went ahead and took the game to the opposition. They were hugely important games because they were the teams around about us and it took a lot to go in with that approach but we pressed teams higher.
“We are more confident now than we were five or six weeks ago. We are taking more risks in the final third. There are small things that individual players are reacting to as the confidence grows.”