AFTER an impressive 4-0 victory over Ayr on Saturday, Partick Thistle manager Ian McCall returns to his hometown of Dumfries to face Queen of the South in the SPFL Trust Trophy tonight, a competition which he believes has its benefits as the rounds progress.

He said: “I think it livens up once you get to the Quarter’s or Semi’s. Obviously we need to make one or two changes.

"Jake Hastie is cup tied and Lewis (Mayo) is playing with Scotland under 21’s. Allan (Johnston) will be the same, it’s a game of football you want to win because once you get to the quarter-finals then people will start to take it seriously.

"If we’re lucky enough to get to the final then there will be an awful lot of thistle fans going to the game, probably 5/6,000, so it’s a game we want to win”.

Ending a run of bad luck after losing three on the bounce, the Jags returned to the play-off hunt with a comfortable display at home to Ayr on Saturday.

McCall feels luck has returned to Firhill after being on the wrong end of a number of close contests this season.

He said: “Yeah, we felt that the three games we lost in a row, we could quite easily have won two and drew one of them. There are some individual errors in there that you need to cut out.

"Even the Inverness game, if we managed to win that one, which we could have been 2/3-0 up at half time, the league would be incredibly tight.

"The confidence never wavered but we changed it a wee bit on Saturday and I think going forward, particularly in the second half, we were excellent.

"We had to be patient because of the way Duff (Jim Duffy) set Ayr up”.

Many Thistle fans took to social media to display their anger against the decision to change the fixture to a 7.45 kick off on Friday night with the last train departing from Dumfries during the game, something of which McCall believes not much could be done about with the risk of clashes with the Scotland game.

He said: “I don’t think there was an easy way to do it. I don’t think it would have happened if it was a league game. A lot of our fans wanted to go to the Scotland game as well. I’m very much a 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon man but if you please some people, you don’t please others and you just have to get on with that.”