Ross Docherty admits that Ian McCall and his coaching staff’s sudden departure from Firhill caught him and his fellow Partick Thistle players off-guard – but the Jags captain believes his former manager getting in touch with a few senior members of the dressing room to wish them well is the mark of the man.
McCall and his assistants, Neil Scally and Alan Archibald, exited the cinch Championship club in the wake of the team’s 3-2 defeat away to Rangers in the Scottish Cup. The visitors had performed admirably that day and gave their Glasgow opponents a game but with the result coming hot on the heels of back-to-back home defeats to Cove Rangers and Hamilton, the Thistle board opted to pull the trigger.
Docherty was says the players were shocked when they heard the news of McCall’s departure on the Sunday night. The now former Thistle manager spoke to Kris Doolan, his replacement in the home dugout at Firhill, the following day to offer the Jags legend his congratulations and McCall and his coaching staff also had some words of encouragement for the playing squad, too.
“I think that would be the main word: shock,” Docherty recalled. “We’d obviously had a couple of bad results the two previous games to playing away to Ibrox and I think before those games, we looked okay. It was at Firhill we struggled to break the two bottom teams in the league down.
“I think the fact that teams are fighting for their lives, there are no easy games and I think folk maybe don’t realise that – how hard it can be at times, especially if you’re a favourite in a game. I was close to all the management so it’s not easy.
“It’s not easy seeing anybody lose their job but I think of where they have put the club from when they came in to now – they have put the club in a much better place in terms of playing squad, in terms of structure. That’s my opinion and I think that will be the opinion of a lot of folk.
“I think the players have been excellent in terms of rallying round the new manager who was interim in the last few weeks but it was always going to be on the players once we got everybody back fit, which was the case just before that game. We have kind of kicked on from there and maybe shown that he was right to get the players in and we were on the right path anyway but we just maybe needed a wee bit of guidance other than that.”
Docherty continued: “I think there was a bit of frustration because we had had so many injuries throughout the season at certain parts and had a few bad spells but we almost felt that game [at Ibrox] was a bit of a turning point.
“We’d had loads of boys back and had a good performance at a difficult place to go, no doubt about that. It wasn’t that they were raging – they were obviously not happy losing their job – but I think they were almost like ‘right, we’ve put them on the right path, can you then go and show what we knew we could do’. They wished Dools and Paul [McDonald, Doolan’s assistant] luck at the time and obviously wished the players luck. Because they don’t leave and just go ‘I hate every one of them’.
“They probably had a wee bit of frustration: ‘that could have been us’. But at the same time, I think he wished us well maybe through one or two senior players. I think that kind of shows the character of the guy. The boys are happy to go through walls for Dools now but also want to show right we were a good team, we have always been a good team, rather than it is just a complete turnaround.”
Doolan, a hugely popular figure at Firhill, has now been given the manager’s gig on a permanent basis after picking up seven points from three tricky away games during his interim stint on the touchline. His first game as the fully-fledged Partick Thistle boss resulted in a 3-0 win over Raith Rovers that cut the gap with league leaders Queen’s Park to six points with nine games left to play.
Those results have reignited the club’s push for the second-tier title and supporters are once again dreaming of watching Thistle go all the way as they draw parallels with the league-winning team of 2012/13 that Doolan was a key part of – but Docherty insists the players have never given up on the prospect of promotion.
“We have had that in the squad the whole time,” the midfielder said of the team’s recent upturn in form. “We’ve slipped down the league but you know the league and know how tight and competitive it is.
“The new manager has instilled that in us and that is what he has spoken about since he has come in – near enough every day – saying they have obviously done it, he has done it as a player here, saying that we have got what it takes to go and get a wee run together and you never know where it is going to take us. He has tried to instil that in us, it was already there but you can see he is positive in his mindset and trying to put that into the players as well.”
Doolan steps into his first role in management with a tremendous amount of goodwill behind him from supporters. Few individuals are held in such high regard by the Thistle fanbase and fewer still have the sort of bond that the former striker enjoys with the fans: something that Docherty feels can only be to the new manager’s benefit, so long as he is afforded patience.
He explained: “I knew Dools from before, he came to Ayr when I was there so I’d known he was a legend here and I think he always will be no matter what he does as a manager here. But that shouldn’t be in the view of the fans – in terms of if they kind of get on his back if he’s not doing well, because he needs the time and he needs the support that anybody else has got – just because he has been here before.
“The players as a whole will back the manager anyway. I think the players have kind of stepped up the last couple of weeks and it’s been difficult and maybe a bit of a shock what happened before in terms of the old management leaving, but I think the fans will give him their huge backing and the players will as well. They always will.”
Docherty added: “There is a kind of feel-good factor about the club. I think that had been the case from the last game under the old manager, obviously we got beat away to Rangers, but there was a kind of a feel-good factor upon that.
“I think the new gaffer has of carried on and he has said that to us: ‘we’re here, we’re giving you the tools but it is all on you guys’. Which it is, it always has been and always will be on the players. They [the coaches] are just there as a guide but he’s been good for us. He has done one or two tweaks but he has not changed too much or been too radical which I think is how it’s worked.”
