Ok, cards on the table. Covering Partick Thistle is my main bread and butter for the Evening Times, so it is clearly to my benefit if I write nice things about their manager Alan Archibald.

I’m not sure how easy it would be to perform my role if I was banned from Firhill or unable to pick up the phone to have a chat with one of the players, but thankfully it has yet to come to that.

I’m also grateful that the Thistle squad conform to that most horrible of football clichés, in that they do genuinely seem like a ‘good bunch of lads’ (copyright John Hughes) and they humour my inane questioning with patience and good grace.

The club are great to deal with, and make my life easy. But it’s not my job to make their lives easy, and there have been periods, particularly at the start of the last two seasons, when it has been necessary to be critical.

Last week, the fourth anniversary of Archibald’s first game in charge passed, which naturally invites a pause for reflection on his reign since being thrust into the position as an untried and untested 35-year-old.

And it is hard to be anything other than effusive in my praise for the overall job that both he and his assistant manager Scott Paterson have done at the club.

The match itself was a 2-2 draw away to Morton, who maintained an eight-point advantage over Thistle on the day, a lead that was then eroded and ultimately overturned as the title was delivered to Firhill. If anything though, that was the easy part.

Coming up to the top flight and consolidating Thistle’s position within it on one of the smallest budgets in the division was always likely to be another matter altogether, but that has been achieved to the extent that finishing in the top half of the table is a viable aim.

Survival, of course, remains the prime objective, but Thistle are a respected outfit in the league and if a top six berth was achieved it would hardly be a major shock.

And all of the success that the club have enjoyed stems from the work being done in the manager’s office. I’ve been fortunate enough to be privy to some of the inner-machinations of the club, and if there is a secret behind it all it lies in the culture and working environment created at the club by Archibald.

Everything is geared towards improvement, and the feeling you get from the players in the squad is that they would run through brick walls for their boss and for each other.

Of course, there have been failures too. The Jags didn’t win at home until February in their first season up and had a terrible start to last season where they failed to taste victory in their first 10 games. During these times, the support of the Partick Thistle board was unwavering and admirable, when many chairmen would have had an itchy trigger finger.

Archibald has been successful on the whole at strengthening and replenishing his squad, with the signings of Callum Booth, Ryan Edwards and the re-capture of Chris Erskine just a few of the success stories.

But there have been duds too, and the failure to find an adequate support act for Kris Doolan up front is perhaps the most notable area where he hasn’t quite managed to get it right. The mere mention of Mathias Pogba and Antonio German is probably enough to make any Jags fan break out in a cold sweat. Ade Azeez is yet to be added to that list, but he really could be doing with a goal or two.

In the grand scheme of things though, Archibald has proved that he is unquestionably one of the best young coaches in Scotland. He’s not a big enough name to be quoted for the vacant Rangers job, but the fact that only Shrewsbury Town have been credited with a concrete interest in his services is puzzling.

If Alan Archibald is the best kept secret in Scottish football though then that’s the way that Partick Thistle like it. He is a fantastic operator. I just hope they don’t ban me for telling everyone.