ABDUL OSMAN says that Partick Thistle’s players owed Saturday’s crucial win over Dundee United to manager Alan Archibald.

Despite playing decent football for the majority of the campaign so far, Thistle went into the game rock-bottom of the table without a win to their name.

Their crushing 3-0 triumph finally got that monkey off their backs and allowed them to leapfrog United in the process.

Now Osman wants to use the momentum from the win to push Thistle further up the Premiership table.

“It was probably the biggest game since I came here,” he said.

“The manager has been good to us. He’s a good manager and obviously we’ve been underperforming this year.

"This game was more important for him than for us because if he was to lose his job, someone else would come in and we’d still have ours. So I think we’ll dedicate this win to the manager.

“He’s got a lot of confidence in me. The fact he brought me up from down south told me that.

“He talks with me all the time and his training sessions are good. He’s more of a man manager which I think helps players a lot.

“It has been frustrating but that’s football – that happens sometimes.

“We can’t change our style of play by playing route one because that’s not us.

“We want to play football so we just had to keep going. We always knew it would come but as time went on you do start to get worried.

“There’s no other way we can play. We have to keep passing it. We believe when it works for us we’ll score goals.

“The manager said we’d keep going playing our own style of football and that the win would come. It did today.

“We created chances for most of the game. In past games they didn’t go in for us but today they did.

“There have been two or three games where we’ve hit the post but today it all went in. We’ll take it.

“It’s important we now try and build on this. That’s what the manager told us after the game.

“We can’t slip back and go another nine or 10 games without a win.

“It’s massively important. The season kicks off for us today. Hopefully we can have a few more results like this coming.

“It was a great result and performance all round. It’s been coming. We know what we can do when we play our best football.

“We went in today knowing if we passed the ball well we could hurt them.

“It’s a huge relief. That’s our tenth game and we’ve finally got the win. Hopefully that kicks us on.”

An important feature of Saturday’s match was the contribution of rampaging right-back Mustapha Dumbuya.

The defender capped off a great week where he was called up to the Sierra Leone squad with a man-of-the-match display, and he even bagged a fortuitous goal in the process.

“He was very good,” Osman said.

“That’s just him. He’s the same in training. He wants success – he’s very hungry as it hadn’t been going well for him down south.

“He’s come up here to try and prove himself, and he’s started very well. He’s been good for the team.”