One point forward, two points back… That is how it looks certain to be for half a dozen or more clubs in the remainder of this SPFL Premiership season as its solitary weekend fixture re-emphasised.

There was frustration all round, but consolation of different sorts to be drawn by both clubs from events at Dens Park on Saturday.

For Dundee the knowledge that remaining tough to beat at home, not having lost there since October, could provide them with an edge, was a compensation for knowing they got lucky on the day.

“I don't think we deserved the three points,” admitted Kevin Holt, scorer of their equaliser after well timed run to meet, at the back post, a well-judged cross from the right, that had been sent over by fellow full-back Cammy Kerr and caught Killie goal-keeper Freddie Woodman in two minds.

“It became very scrappy towards the end and I felt they started better than us. They deserved their lead and when we got back into the game, things started to swing a bit towards our favour.

“You want the three points rather than a point obviously. A point isn't that good to either team. We wanted the win to push us into the top-six but we weren't able to take the chance.

“During the game, both teams could feel the need for the three points rather than just settling for a point.”

Which explained the nerviness of much of the play and, as he also noted, it had been similar the previous week when they had squandered a two goal lead at bottom side Inverness.

The pattern repeated itself on Saturday with Killie entitled to feel that if they had not exactly been robbed, they could have made life a lot easier for themselves had they capitalised better on their superiority in the early exchanges, just as had been the case at Hamilton a week earlier.

While, then, their captain Kris Boyd was principally emphasising the need to defend better when describing their need to be willing to do the ‘ugly’ stuff, he also accepted that the front men could have made more of their chances than score the solitary early goal which saw him delicately knock the ball round the out-rushing Scott Bain after being released on-on-one with the goal-keeper.

“Us as strikers have got to take chances to make it two, three and I don’t think two or three nil, the first half an hour, would have been an injustice,” he quite reasonably claimed.

Boyd reckons the pattern is now pretty much set for what is to come in the closing stages of the season, his side having climbed from eighth spot into the top half of the table thanks to the point acquired, while Dundee, who had been one place above the play-off spot before kick off, are now seventh and just one behind them in the bid to claim that ever more vital looking sixth spot come the split.

“I don’t think it’s going to change now, I think the whole league from the start of the season, yeah you might have a team that pulls away one week, but then the next week they’re caught,” Boyd observed.

“I think everybody’s spent a week or two weeks in that top six and then the next thing they’re back in that relegation play-off spot.”

All of which only served to emphasise the case for finding ways of getting results rather than focusing too much on football philosophy that Boyd went on to make.

His remarks were, of course, addressed towards Kilmarnock’s performance but it would not take a John Le Carre imagination to conclude that the former Rangers striker was thinking more broadly on the weekend that the man whose arrival at Ibrox just as he was leaving a second time, took his turn to depart after a week that had seen Mark Warburton’s postulations on randomness theory closely scrutinised across the media.

“When you look especially at the last two performances and the way we’ve dominated the ball the first 30, 35 minutes I think we switch off the bread and butter of football, working hard stopping other teams playing, winning your second balls, winning your headers, which we’ve done in the last two games up until the 30 minute mark,” Boyd observed.

“Then all of a sudden, do we think we’re better than we are I don’t know in terms of we end up popping it about, but it’s part of football. Yeah you want to look good, but you’re fed up listening to managers going into press conferences after it and saying we’ve had X amount of possession of the ball, we’ve had X amount of passes.

“It doesn’t really matter how you win a game of football. You go and score more goals than the opposition that’s it and for us that’s what we need to get back to in terms of go and win the game, do what we need to do.

“Sometimes it takes just doing the ugly part of the game to see it out.”