Steven Pressley needed a bit of positivity in his first match in charge after his ‘welcome’ from Dundee fans.
It was only a friendly but there will have been a bit of relief from the new head coach that things went to plan and his team won.
That’s despite the conditions at Arbroath. Everyone knows it’s going to be windy but that was something else.
Pressley was right in his comments about being pleased his players had to go through adversity to get a win.
We’ve all been to lacklustre pre-season matches where players are getting little more than minutes in the bank.
Dealing with the conditions and coming out with victory helps bring the team together.
Player buy-in
What also helps from the player’s point of view is seeing things they’ve worked on in training come off in games.
There’s a reason managers do training drills – they want to see these moves help their team in actual matches.
It’s a huge positive in the very first friendly to see some of the new things in action, that helps the buy-in from the players.
It’s only a start and there is a lot of work still to be done, a huge amount. But starting steps are important.
Pressley, too, is still getting used to his players. He’s finding out who is good at taking on information and putting it into practice on the pitch and who isn’t so good.
Players are all different, they have different skills. One of those is listening to a coach and putting their lessons into practice.
Flair
It is only the first friendly and no doubt the Dundee team will look a lot different by the time the Premiership gets under way.
There is still plenty of work to be done on the transfer front.
I’d like to see some creative players come in. The squad is pretty stacked with central defenders. Nothing wrong with centre-backs in my book…
But they definitely need to add some flair.
Adding to that need is the injury picked up by Charlie Reilly.
I feel really sorry for him. He’s a talented player but can’t put together any kind of run in the team without injuries striking.
There’s nothing worse than that. Especially when you get injured at the start of a season.
Reilly will have put in so much work already to get himself as ready as he possibly could be for the season to come.
One game in and he’s out for a couple of months.
That’s tough to deal with.
That was a big negative at Arbroath. One huge positive was the young players getting a run-out.
That will have been the biggest crowd a lot of them have played in front of, playing against Championship-level players.
What an experience for them. They will all have taken so much from the experience.
There’s a lot of good work going on in the Dundee academy, no doubt.
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