ALL supporters of smaller clubs would argue that their team never does anything the easy way, but when it comes to Partick Thistle, it is hard to contest the notion that they seem to put their fans through the wringer more than most.

There is the easy way, the hard way, and then the Thistle way. And they are navigating the play-off final, unfortunately for the Firhill faithful, very much in the Thistle way. A dispiriting 2-1 defeat to Livingston on Thursday night has the Jags clinging on to their Premiership status by their fingernails going into the second leg this afternoon, but according to their midfielder Ryan Edwards, it just wouldn’t be Thistle if the tie was going any other way. And he is certain that in is particular time of adversity, that the Firhill players will stand up and prevail.

“It seems to be the Thistle way that we make it difficult for ourselves,” Edwards said. “We don’t keep clean sheets and we are leaving it until the last possible moment to see what our fate is. I think this situation brings the best out in us. It hasn’t been a good season and we know that, but whenever we have needed a result, we have got one and hopefully that can be the same against Livingston.”

Edwards was less than enthused at having to watch a re-run of the game at the Tony Macaroni Stadium when he trooped into work on Friday morning, but he concedes it was necessary for the Thistle players to face up to the issues that caused that defeat, and learn quickly from the problems they caused for themselves on the night.

“It was very disappointing,” he said. “We were a bit down in the 24 hours after the game. But it’s only half time in the tie, we’ve trained and watched the video of where we went wrong and the small parts we did well. We can rectify this, it’s still in our hands. We’ve played better at home. We haven’t done well away.

“The fans are behind us here, we go into Sunday where we know we need to win and score at least one to go to extra time. And we’re more than capable of doing that, even scoring two to make sure we stay in the league next season.

“It’s the biggest game in my career, personally. The biggest game for everyone. Biggest game for us. Biggest game for Livingston. Every player, staff and fan. 100 per cent.”

Much of the talk from the Thistle camp during the post-mortem of Thursday night has centred around the need to impose their own style of play on to their Championship opponents, who successfully dragged Alan Archibald’s men into a scrap during the week. Edwards agrees, and he has stressed that when Livingston come to Firhill, it is vital that the game is played on the home side’s terms.

“Livingston had a game plan, we had a game plan and they did it better,” he said. “We played into their hands. That’s not the type of game we wanted to play. Credit to them, they were much better than us on the day. Hopefully we can rectify that on Sunday. We knew it was going to be difficult. Livingston start games really well. They did that again and we were fortunate to go ahead when they were on top.

“The first 20 minutes you need to earn the right to play and we did that, and then we kept doing it, rather than changing it and starting to play our football.

“We stayed in the same mentality and never really got out of that. We watched it back and saw where we went wrong. Hopefully we can change that on a bigger pitch that’s better for us.

“It was painful to watch back. There were a very small number of positives from that performance for us and a lot of negatives.

“You want to be playing in the Premiership every season. I think the squad we have is good enough to do that. I don’t want to play in the Championship so I will be doing all I can to make sure I do that next season.”