According to Tony Docherty, Dundee has bounced back from its “bump in the road” earlier this month and still has every chance to have a successful season.
With eight games left until the split, the Dark Blues are only four points outside the top six and within six points of Europe, despite dropping to 10th place in the William Hill Premiership after losing their previous two league games 6-0 to Hearts and Celtic.
Docherty emphasised that his team still has a lot to play for as Dundee recovered from those back-to-back crushing losses with a 4-0 victory against Airdrie at home to advance to the Scottish Cup quarterfinals, where they will face Hearts.
“We are in a position where we have a great deal of control over our own fate,” he stated. “We will give ourselves an opportunity to go from what has been a mediocre season to a truly fantastic one if we can perform at a consistent level.
We’re going to need that in the upcoming games, so it’s fortunate timing that many of our injuries have healed and that we have a strong, competitive team. There, we survived a time when we were exhausted. Now that we are more powerful, we require everyone’s cooperation.
“With the cup out of the picture, there are eight games left. We must really push it and make an effort to demonstrate the consistency that, ideally, will provide the outcomes that will get us there.
Although the two humiliating 6-0 losses received a lot of attention, Docherty thinks his team has been playing well after Christmas.
The Dee manager, whose team hosts Aberdeen on Saturday, stated, “I think in context, you look at our last six league fixtures, that we had in adversity where we had a really threadbare squad.” In addition to Rangers and Dundee United, we played Celtic twice. We played four games against the top three in these six games, and we had very significant away victories over St. Johnstone and St. Mirren right before that.
“There is no denying that we experienced a setback with the Hearts match and the subsequent challenging Celtic match, but I believe it was crucial to regain your course. And I believe we accomplished it on Saturday when we played Airdrie in the cup.
“After our difficult run of games, it was just a matter of making sure we stayed in contact with the teams around us going into this run of games, and we currently have important games coming up.”
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