Dee have to ignore table and beat ICT

THERE’S no way of sugar coating things — it was a painful weekend for Dundee.

Losing an injury-time goal to go down to Rangers at Ibrox must have been agonising.

And learning results elsewhere meant they’d slipped back down to the bottom of the Premiership must have made for a long and silent bus journey home.

But my advice to the Dark Blues right now is to ignore the league table and just concentrate on winning your next game.

In fact that’s sound thinking for everyone from sixth place down in the top flight.

Only three points separate bottom from sixth spot and, for those seven teams, that means win, lose or draw on a Saturday and you still have a lot of hard work to do to make sure you stay in the league for next season.

For me, that’s the way it’s going to stay for a long time, possibly right up to the last week of the season.

Most of the Premiership is so tight right now that a couple of wins, a win and a draw even, can shoot you right up the table.

Likewise, as Dundee just found, one defeat can send you crashing to the bottom.

As I said the other week, one thing no one down there should be doing is paying any thought to the race for the top six.

Everyone is so close the priority has to be keeping out of bottom place.

Paul Hartley’s team can pull away from there again if they beat Inverness Caley Thistle at Dens this Saturday.

For a start, three points would move them above ICT, who are seventh right now.

And, as painful as the nature of the weekend loss was, Dundee should take confidence from their performance at Ibrox.

Rangers may not be the team they were but most other outfits who go there will not take anything, so the point they almost won would have been a bonus.

At least this time they handled the Ibrox atmosphere. That’s something they clearly didn’t do when they got hammered by the Gers in last season’s Scottish Cup.

They won their two games before Saturday and a result this weekend means they’ll still be on a good run.

So forget about being bottom and concentrate on reproducing the good work put in over the last few weeks.

Dundee can take heart, despite the defeat, from the performance against Rangers at Ibrox on Saturday.