The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
More attractive football will be back, says O’Dea
Building up team confidence is the priority for now, however.
More attractive football will hopefully “come back” for Dundee, according to Dark Blues captain Darren O’Dea.
But building up confidence with results, however they may come, is the priority.
The former Celtic and Republic of Ireland centre-back believes the threeat-the-back formation has made Dundee more solid in general.
He said: “After the Partick game the manager decided this was the way we were going to play. It wasn’t going to be pretty at times and it hasn’t been, but we’ve got some results and I feel the results will build confidence.
“With that we will slowly come back to playing more attractive football, if that’s what you want to call it.”
The 2-0 defeat to Kilmarnock last weekend was an undoubted set-back for the Dens Park men, but the statistics confirm that they have been one of the hardest teams in the league to score against in the last month.
The improvement has followed one of the “toughest weeks” O’Dea has endured as a professional footballer.
He said: “After the Partick defeat it was as low as we’ve been as a team. It was a difficult period.
“I’ve been in a football a long time. That was one of the toughest weeks that I’ve had.
“We were struggling to play the type of football we want to play so we decided we needed to be tough to beat.”
Saturday’s opponents Ross County are on an unbeaten run of four matches, which followed a run of four defeats from five during October.
Defender Jay McEveley says recent results have lifted the mood at Victoria Park, and he added: “Looking across the season we do have bad spells. Maybe that was ours. To come out the other side and do as we have been doing shows the character of the players.
“We could have easily been heads down and in a dog fight all year but we’ve turned a corner.
“I know it’s still tight, we are still a couple of points off the bottom, but we are looking up not looking down.
“We’ve got the confidence and we know exactly what we’re doing. Everything seems to be come together.”