Many footballers who to all intents and purposes were operating on just one leg, would take the sensible option and look to be substituted but James McPake isn’t one of them.
The big centre-half suffered a debilitating dead leg during the second half of Dundee’s League Cup derby at Tannadice on Wednesday night.
With the Dark Blues down to 10 men following Martin Boyle’s dismissal in the 26th minute, McPake was determined to stay on the pitch and he was certainly no passenger producing a heroic performance, both in defence and then marauding forward at corners.
And thankfully for Dundee, who will be missing his centre-half partner Thomas Konrad through suspension on Saturday up in Dingwall against Ross County, McPake insists he will be fit to play.
He said: “It is probably the stupidness in me that I wanted to stay on. It was a dead leg so you know if you can keep the heat in it, you will be OK.
“It was a bit restricting but I wasn’t going to ask to come off it’s not in my character.
“The only way I would do that was if I was hindering the team but I felt I could still do all right.
“It was painful but that’s all. If you can deal with that, it’s not an issue.
“The problem comes if you think you can do further damage but I didn’t believe I would do that so I was happy to play on.
“I think I should be OK for Saturday. It was a sore one but I will get the ice on it and the feet up until then and it should settle quite quickly.”
McPake could not prevent United winning the tie with the Dark Blues suffering the heartache of losing to a last-gasp Jarek Fojut goal.
However, the former Hibs defender insisted that the Dundee players had restored much of the pride lost when going down 4-1 to the Tangerines on Sunday at Dens in the league.
He said: “There is a way to lose a football match and tonight certainly was that.
“It was night and day from Sunday. You saw the reaction of the fans at the end.
“Every single one of the Dundee supporters stayed despite the fact we were out of the cup.
“I think the way we played, especially when we went down to 10 men was credit to each and every one of us.
“It was a hard one to take but we gave a better account of ourselves and we move on to Saturday now.”
When asked if the criticism the players had received after Sunday, had fired them up, he said: “Yes, rightly so. Your biggest critic in football is yourself and we knew we had let ourselves, the supporters and manager down.
“So we didn’t need fired up, we had been doing well all season.
“We are disappointed with how Sunday went so we had to turn up at Tannadice and put a show on and that’s what we did.
“Although we lost that last-minute goal, it was still a great cup tie.
“There was a superb atmosphere with two teams having a real go.
“I think we were well on top in the first 30 minutes.
“Unfortunately, Greg doesn’t score the penalty but I think it was a better save than a miss. Going down to 10 men, we had to dig deep but we did that and were unfortunate.”
Better spirits going up to Dingwall?
He said: “To be fair we came to Tannadice in good spirits.
“We sat down on Monday and went over the game. Looking back, it wasn’t a 4-1 match. It was four mistakes, something we hadn’t been doing all season, getting caught on the ball.
“United were great on Sunday but we were the cause of our own downfall.
“So we were disappointed in that sense but we came down to Tannadice confident.
“It would be daft to go eight games unbeaten and then let the heads go down. That’s not the way the players are and it’s certainly not the way the manager would let us be.
So we were confident and I think that showed in the first 30 minutes of the game when we were on top by a mile.
“We had so many corners, I was blowing going up for them!”