Dundee United captain Jon Daly insists a three-week lay-off won’t hamper the Tannadice club when they eventually get back into SPL action against Aberdeen.
There was understandable frustration in the Tangerines camp at Saturday’s abandonment of their match at Motherwell due to a power cut.
Peter Houston’s men were straining at the leash to get two heavy league defeats in a row out of their system against the Steelmen, only for the game to be called off at around 3.15pm.
To compound matters, there’s now an international break, meaning they won’t have a game until the Dons come to Dundee on October 20.
Daly said: “Everyone was looking forward to this game so it was really disappointing that it didn’t go ahead. When you come off a couple of bad defeats you just want the next game to come round as quickly as possible. Unfortunately for us that hasn’t happened and now we’ll have a couple more weeks to wait.
”Motherwell hadn’t been on a great run themselves so we were looking on this as a good chance to get back on track. We’ll keep working hard over the next couple of weeks now, and make sure we’re well prepared to play Aberdeen.
”Possibly we might get a couple of bounce matches in between. It will be three weeks for us, but it will be two weeks for Aberdeen. There won’t be a problem with our fitness, which we’ll keep working on over the next couple of weeks, so I don’t see that being an issue.”
He added: ”We were warmed up ready for the game and were basically getting ready to come on when the ref came into the dressing room and told us there was a delay of 10 minutes. Then obviously it’s been called off.
”There’s nothing we could do about it. It was outside issues that caused it and we just had to accept that. We didn’t have any days off through the week, and we’ve worked extremely hard on what we felt had gone wrong.
”We’ve been working on our shape and getting back to basics so that everybody knows their job and there’s no excuses. It’s easy to point the finger at each other when you’re not doing well but working on team shape sets in stone everybody’s job.”
Mark Millar was due to make his first start in Lanarkshire, while Stuart Armstrong was also named in the starting XI.
Daly confirmed a tactical switch regarding his own position.
”I was going to play centre-half,” he said. ”I’ve done it a couple of times and the manager said to me earlier in the week that he was contemplating playing me there. Actually, the last time I played there was against Motherwell at the end of last season. I quite enjoy it and I’ll play wherever the manager needs me.”
It was expected that Gavin Gunning would have been deployed at left-back.
Manager Peter Houston will now head off with the Scotland team for the next 10 days.
He said: ”There’s nothing we could do about the call-off and we’ll now look forward to the Aberdeen game.”