Unbeaten this season and with a first piece of silverware in the bag, things could hardly be going any better for Kyles Athletic, but a wariness accompanies the growing optimism about what could be achieved this term.

Saturday’s emphatic 3-1 victory in the Gregor Cameron Consultancy Celtic Society Cup final seemed all the more telling because they were up against Oban Camanachd, the one team that had previously denied them a victory this season. However, as they celebrated their fifth success in a row in the competition contested exclusively among the sport’s southern clubs, James Perlich, their manager, noted that they have very recent experience of being similarly placed, only to lose momentum at a critical stage.

“There is expectation, but I don’t feel we actually perform that well with looking too far ahead,” he said.

“We’ve been caught out with that before. Last year we were in the exact same position. We won the Celtic Cup and we were doing okay in the league with games in hand, but within a three-week spell we were out of the running. Again we were getting asked these questions and the expectations that we could push on from that position, but I’ve found it’s more important to keep them grounded and just really think short-term goals.

“These players have always, right from primary level, won national competitions, but sometimes where they have faltered is thinking of the plaudits at the end of the season and what they could win rather than thinking about what we need to do on Saturday, so it’s about keeping as disciplined as we can through the week and keeping those goals a bit shorter.

“If they do that then I think they can do well, because they’ve got the ability, but every team out there have taken points off other teams. So you can’t take anything for granted, so the players can’t afford to think they can maybe not go to training one night or have a weekend off. Unfortunately we don’t have that much depth in the squad to be able to do that.”

They now return to the regular fare of Marine Harvest Premiership action this weekend protecting a two-point lead in the league table over Kinlochshiel who emerged as their main challengers after leap-frogging Kingussie with a 2-1 victory which took them into second spot in the table.

Perhaps more tellingly they have a six-point advantage over Newtonmore who have won the Premiership in each of the past six years, but Perlich’s philosophy means that the back-to-back visits to the champions in July, when they will meet them in the Premiership and then in the quarter-final of the Camanachd Cup on successive Saturdays, is being pushed far from their thoughts at this stage in the season.

“We’ll get back to training and prepare for a tough league game on Saturday against Glasgow Mid-Argyll who are desperate to stay up in the Premier League, so we need to take that game on its own merits and prepare for that,” the manager observed.

As to what they might achieve, he believes lessons learned in their encounters with Saturday’s beaten finalists can be crucial.

“In the first game of the season we played them in Oban and won 4-3 and they’d already beaten Newtonmore,” he noted.

“We managed the whole game to concentrate on our shinty and won that, but then when it came to Tighnabruich we ended up falling into the trap of getting involved with things we didn’t need to and we didn’t play shinty.

“This time I’m proud of them because I know they can play shinty all day long, but keeping that discipline is important.”