Partick Thistle new boy Blair Spittal has learned all too quickly about an Achilles heel that has plagued the Jags in recent years, as another late goal sunk them against Aberdeen on Saturday.

And he believes that he and his teammates will have to sharpen up mentally if they are to arrest their winless start to the season.

Thistle fell to their fourth defeat from four as they went down by the odd goal in seven to the table-topping Dons, but there were plenty of positives for Spittal to draw from the encounter.

The avoidable manner of the goals they lost though was the major concern for the midfielder, admitting culpability on his own part for one of those strikes.

“Some of the goals were down to our own mistakes,” said Spittal. “I have to look at myself at the third goal, because the boy Scott Wright beats me too easily before he scores a wonder goal.

“That shows you the fine margins. In this league, you make one mistake and you will be punished for it, so we have to learn from that quickly.

“We need to concentrate a lot more late on too. We could have stopped the cross coming in for Aberdeen’s fourth, although I thought we defended the cross balls well in the main.

“We knew that they would put a lot of crosses in with their physical presence, but we handled it until the one near the end.

“We’ve got to make sure that we maintain our focus when we get to the later stages of the game.

“We have to learn from these defeats before putting them to the back of our minds as quickly as we can.

“It was a tough loss on Saturday, but there were enough positives to take into the game against Ross County.”

The Aberdeen match was Spittal’s first appearance in the league this season after injury disrupted a fine start to his Thistle career in their Betfred Cup group campaign, and he is looking to get match-sharp again as soon as possible.

“It was nice to be back involved,” he said. “The last few weeks have been frustrating to have been out injured, especially after the way pre-season went.

“Hopefully now I can get a run of games under my belt. On Saturday, I was still a wee bit off it in terms of my sharpness at points, but hopefully I can step it up again.

“We have a lot of good attacking options in the team, and if you are not on your game the manager will take you out, and you can have no complaints about that.

“Now that I’m in the team it’s up to me to take that chance, and that’s all I can really do.”

Despite the less than perfect start to life at Firhill in terms of results for Spittal, he is in no doubt that he made the right move by joining Thistle in the summer.

And he is certain that things will soon start to turn for Alan Archibald’s side.

“It’s still early days,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of confidence in the players we’ve got in the changing room that we can put a run together and start moving up the table.

“I’m sure we will be fine once we get going. Once we get a win or two under the belt, the confidence will grow from there.”