Partick Thistle manager Alan Archibald says he may pitch new signing Niall Keown straight into the starting eleven for Saturday’s trip to Inverness.

Reading defender Keown completed his move to the Jags on loan for the rest of the season on Wednesday afternoon, but he has been training with the club for the last few weeks.

The trip to La Manga allowed both parties to size one another up, with both player and manager liking what they saw of one another.

And with suspensions to key players and the departure of Ziggy Gordon to Jagiellonia Bia?ystok, he could get an early chance to show the Thistle support just what he can do.

“It’s good that he’s been with us for a wee while and we could get a look at him and he could get a look at us,” Archibald said.

“It doesn’t feel as if it’s just a new signing this week because he’s been part of the group already.

“We’re delighted to get him signed up. He’ll be in the squad for Saturday and we’ve no concerns about playing him.

“We have a couple of suspensions with Danny Devine and Abdul being out, so he comes into contention.”

Keown has featured just twice for Reading, but that doesn’t concern Archibald, even though he admits he wouldn’t normally take a punt on someone with so little first-team experience.

“We don’t usually take first loans, we usually like to see them out on loan at a couple of other teams first, but we got a chance to look at him and we liked what we saw when he was in Spain with us,” he said.

“I like the type of defender he is, and that’s why we’ve went for him. There were other guys out there, but we felt we were better to go with the younger, hungrier type rather than someone a bit older.

“He fitted in with the group really well too, and that was another good thing about going to Spain.”

With Devine absent, it will be a relief for Thistle fans to hear that Liam Lindsay should be fine for the trip north after recovering from surgery on his nose.

“It was more of a precaution that he didn’t play last week,” Archibald explained.

“He’s fine, he’s got a mask that he can wear for protection but it’s horrible, it makes him look even worse. It’s a big black one. It’s awful, he looks like Zorro or something.

“He’s taking a bit of stick. To be fair, the one he had before was even worse, it was just an off-the-shelf one that we bought that was horrific, it was like a scuba diving mask.

“He couldn’t see the ball right so this one is much better, it’s custom-fit so he can have no complaints.”

Thistle eased their way back into action with a comfortable win over Formartine in the Scottish Cup last week, maintaining the confident mood in the squad after their good form over the festive season.

Archibald knows though that they must raise their performance levels again if they want to prolong their decent run any further.

“Hopefully we can continue in that vein of form, but we’ve got three tough games coming up,” he said.

“We’ve got St Johnstone at home after Inverness and then Aberdeen away, so we did it before the break and we know we will need similarly resolute performances to get similar points on the board.

“It would be a fantastic cushion and we know that is there for us. That’s our goal and it is a fantastic incentive for the players as well.

But Inverness will be thinking that they’ve got to cut that gap like we were a couple of weeks ago. We need to be very wary of the opposition”