DUNDEE manager Neil McCann has challenged his players to redeem themselves in Saturday’s bottom of the table battle with Partick Thistle.
The former Scotland internationalist read his team the riot act after falling to a toothless 2-0 defeat to Hearts on Tuesday, with the loss pushing the Dens Park outfit in the relegation play-off zone.
The high of earning successive wins against Rangers and Ross County has quickly been forgotten about following back-to-back set-backs against Aberdeen and Hearts.
McCann is demanding a reaction from his players when Thistle, who currently prop up the Premiership, visit this weekend.
McCann said: “It’s a chance for them to redeem themselves and I’m in that.
“But what I’ll make sure is that that is not accepted, you can be assured of that.
“We had been working really hard to find a level of performance and I thought we had found it but we've come right off it against Hearts.
“In the second half we had sparks and spells and in the first half we had sparks and spells but that’s not good enough, it really isn’t good enough.
"I can accept the Aberdeen (1-0) result, I don’t like it when we lose but I can say we deserved something from the game because the performance level was good and the applications levels were high, but Tuesday night was not good enough, neither in performance nor in application.
“It’s a hard for to change a group of players when they’re on the pitch and they don’t perform like that, other than making the allocated substitutions
“Ultimately, they should be hurting because I’m hurting but that won’t tolerated and we’ll deal with it inside.”
McCann, meanwhile, has hit out at Hearts striker Cole Stockton for the ‘cheap shot’ challenge that forced Jack Hendry off a half-time due to double vision.
Stockton clattered in the defender, who has been linked with a move to Celtic, at the back post after Hendry got to Anthony McDonald’s cross first.
The 22-year-old now looks certain to sit out the visit of Thistle.
McCann added: “Jack got a cheap shot at the back post, it was a nasty one and that’s the type of thing that the boy can break his collar bone or something like that.
“It ended up that we lost him through double vision and when you get a boy with double vision and it’s a knock to the head, you can’t take any chances clearly. We had to take him off.”
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