Poor finishing, good goalkeeping or just plain old hard luck – whatever the reason for the ball staying out of the net, Dundee’s struggle to score goals this season has become a familiar tale.
Fans are frustrated, manager is frustrated and the players are most certainly frustrated.
Queen’s Park, meanwhile, are quite happy after notching another four goals on Saturday to open up a four-point gap at the summit of the Championship.
That can be cut back to one almost immediately by the Dark Blues tomorrow when Partick Thistle visit Dens Park.
But avoiding the same pitfalls as the weekend draw with Inverness, where Dundee dominated for large spells but could only find one goal, will be crucial.
‘Two perfectly-good goals’
Two controversially disallowed goals, twice hitting the bar and the inability to beat goalkeeper Mark Ridgers from open play was punished by a deflected Cammy Harper effort to earn a second-best Inverness side a point.
“We had chances but it is just becoming a bit familiar in terms of not putting teams away,” Dark Blues skipper Ryan Sweeney said.
“We scored two perfectly-good goals.
“Lyall (Cameron) has been flagged for offside when he was miles onside.
“At (Lee Ashcroft’s disallowed) goal, I don’t even know if he has given it for a foul. I am not actually too sure.
“I was right behind Ashy when he headed it in and he had to go for the ball. Nine times out of 10, if that’s in open play it’s not a foul.
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“One came off the bar and then came to (Jordan) McGhee too fast before bouncing off him.
“Then the other one came off the bar and dropped into the keeper’s arms.
“It is so frustrating as I didn’t think our performance was bad at all.
“They are the small breaks that unfortunately didn’t go for us.
“Their goal took a huge deflection off me and somehow rolled into the back of the net.
“That kind of summed up our day.”
Deflected goal
Though their wide players had been lively, Inverness had offered very little in attack before a breakaway early in the second half.
Cammy Harper, who scored two excellent goals at Dens Park in a 3-2 win early in the season, fired goalwards and saw his effort find the net once more, this time taking a big deflection off Sweeney on its way.
“The lad hit it OK but he has dragged it and I have reacted to get a block on it,” Sweeney recalled.
“I thought it might spin wide but somehow it crept in.
“I am a firm believer that you make your own luck but it was just so unfortunate which is why it was so frustrating today.
“We have played a lot worse this season and won games – that’s sometimes the way it drops.
“It definitely 100% feels like a defeat.
“I think our performance was good enough to merit three points.”
‘Massive potential’
He added: “It is important that we recover and then go again on Tuesday.
“There are 11 games remaining and that’s a heck of a lot of points to play for.
“We are still looking to get on the same sort of run we were on before Christmas.
“We need to start putting teams to bed and we have massive potential to do that.
“There are still lots of improvements we want to make.
“We spoke at half-time and after the game that there’s lots of stuff we want to work on and get better at.
“I think if we get near the sort of levels and even better, we are more than capable of putting a run together.”
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