Like many Partick Thistle supporters, goalkeeper Tomas Cerny is coming to dread the opening weeks of the season.

In all three campaigns he has been at the club, they have started poorly, and this season has been no exception as the Jags still search for their first win in eight league fixtures.

On the flip side, every season he has been at Firhill, Thistle have managed to turn around their form and fortunes to climb not only away from the bottom of the table, but to challenge for a top half finish.

So, while he concedes that the game against Kilmarnock after the international break is a huge one for the club, the keeper has seen even gloomier situations before and witnessed the Jags come through the other side.

And he has no reason to doubt his team’s powers of recovery this season, either.

“It’s a big game, but I’ve been in these sorts of situations before,” Cerny said.

“In my first season, but we didn’t win one game in the first nine or 10, then we beat Dundee United 3-0 at home. That was certainly an important game because we went above them and kicked on from there.

“Last year, we were bottom of the table just before Christmas and had to go up to Ross County. That was probably an even more difficult situation and we managed to win as well, so I’ve been there and done it before as have the managerial staff and a lot of the boys.

“It is still early in the season. We’ve been in this situation in the last two seasons, and we have always managed to overcome it and get ourselves out of these situations.

“That gives us belief and confidence that we will do it again. The manager always stays calm and manages to keep the team sticking together to get through difficult times such as these. I’m more than confident that we will do it again.

“We obviously need to record that first win, we know that, and that will give us something to build on.”

In order to beat Kilmarnock, or any other team in the Premiership for that matter, Thistle will need to show a vast improvement in the timid performance they turned in at Motherwell last time out, and Cerny knows it.

“The Motherwell performance was the worst I can remember for quite a while,” he said.

“We knew that if we produced a similar performance as we did against Rangers or Hearts we should have been taking something from that game, but it just wasn’t there.

“Why, I don’t know. It’s something we have to improve upon and quickly. We can’t afford to play in that manner.

“The performances weren’t too bad in most of the games leading up to that, and hopefully the game on Saturday was more the exception than the rule and we learn from that.”

As the great football cliché goes, players usually can’t wait to get back out on the field after such a demoralising defeat to put things right, so you may think the international break came at the worst possible time for Thistle.

In Cerny’s opinion though, it might just be the best thing that could have happened to allow the Jags players to take stock of their situation, and work on the things that have been going wrong on the field.

“The break isn’t a bad thing at all for us,” he said. “We’ve had a good chat and we’ve cleared the air a bit, and we know what we have to do now.

“It’s a case of working hard on the stuff that has been going wrong and trying to improve things going into the next game.

“Hard work is the only way to turn it around, and we have shown that before.”