This was not the kind of Devine intervention Partick Thistle were looking for. While Dundee’s Sofien Moussa was worshipped like a deity after a brace which ended his three month barren run, poor old Danny Devine must have felt about as popular as the devil at choir practice. The Irishman gave away two penalties which Moussa converted as Dundee won this bottom of the table encounter at a canter.

Having branded his side a “joke” in the grisly aftermath of the midweek defeat to Hearts, Neil McCann, the Dundee manager, was a changed man yesterday after this rousing triumph. “I’m smiling now,” he said with a beam that could’ve spanned the Tay. “We’ve shown when the application is right it looks like we are a really good side.”

McCann picked out Moussa for special praise. “He works so hard,” he added. “He can look unorthodox but I said to him that I’ll not stop believing in him. It would’ve be easy to take him out of the side after Tuesday but we could’ve changed eight or nine guys after that defeat. I stuck with him and his overall performance was fantastic.”

Dundee began with plenty of purpose and their efforts to prise an early breakthrough were given a helping hand by Thistle defender Devine whose sliced intervention hurtled towards the goal but brought out a fine reflex save from his keeper, Tomas Cerny.

The hosts had more attacking oomph about them and the bustling, burly industry of Moussa was giving the Thistle rear guard plenty of chores to deal with. His general menace bore fruit on 19 minutes, when he went jinking into the box and was felled by Devine. From the resulting penalty, Moussa himself completed the necessaries with composed authority.

Moussa was at the vanguard of most of Dundee’s thrusts and he was involved again as the hosts doubled their advantage before the break. Moussa sent El Bakhtaoui scampering free with a measured release and from his cross, A-Jay Leitch-Smith’s initial effort was blocked by Cerny before Mark O’Hara gobbled up the leftovers.

Thistle were in a bit of a fankle. By this stage of their last game against Motherwell, they were 3-0 up. Now they were needing to mount a sizeable salvage operation. A flurry of substitutions by the visitors after the resumption did little to alter their fortunes and they were the engineers of their own downfall just after the hour. Both Jordan Turnbull and Devine made hashes of attempted clearances and amid the debris, Devine brought Kerr down in the box and Moussa scored from the spot again. It was a calamitous episode.

O’Hara almost added to Thistle’s woes with a raking drive which Cerny palmed away as Dundee coasted to the final whistle.

“We didn’t start the game well enough and I think some players thought they could just turn up and have a similar start to what we had against Motherwell,” said Alan Archibald, the Thistle manager. “It doesn’t work like that in football. You’ve got to earn that. You have to win your individual battles and we didn’t do that. We’ve got teams around us to play and if we don’t battle we’ll be cut adrift. We have to cut out the errors.”