Recently dismissed by Kilmarnock, his arrival looked like the final roll of the dice.<\/p>\n
It was back to the future for County, a nod to the glory days of the not-so-long-ago when Kettlewell and co-manager \u2013 now chief executive \u2013 Steven Ferguson guided Ross County to the Championship crown back in 2019.<\/p>\n
Early signs were promising. In his first game back \u2013 in front of the BBC Scotland cameras \u2013 County downed high-flying Partick Thistle 2-0.<\/p>\n
Defeats followed to St Johnstone and Motherwell in cup competitions, no shame there.<\/p>\n
The embers were flickering, with three wins from their next six league matches. However, the past six have been winless. Four of those have been defeats.<\/p>\n
That 4-0 loss to relegation rivals Airdrie tells a grim story and Kettlewell’s strong words felt like a desperate attempt to salvage something. Anything.<\/p>\n
A final ‘Hail Mary’, full of hope for a reaction rather than expectation. Can it stir an unlikely rally from a moribund squad?<\/p>\n
If only they could take a leaf out of the Queen’s Park book.<\/p>\n
After losing their best player Josh Fowler in the January window, few predicted the Spiders would climb out of their web of misery at the bottom of the table.<\/p>\n
But a run of four wins from six games in February and March transformed their season and suddenly they had a glimpse of making the promotion play-off places.<\/p>\n
Form has tailed off slightly but just two defeats in their past nine matches means they remain buoyant and last week they held league leaders St Johnstone to a 1-1 draw in Perth.<\/p>\n
County can get off the bottom of the table with a win on Friday. It would move them a point above Airdrieonians, albeit the Diamonds would have two games in hand.<\/p>\n
With four fixtures remaining, County’s survival chances appear slim.<\/p>\n
They have won the fewest games in the division and lost the most; they are the joint lowest scorers and have conceded the greatest number of goals.<\/p>\n
There is a small sliver of hope for the Staggies, based on the three previous meetings with Queen’s Park this season. The away side has edged it each time and County really need to keep that sequence going.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Recently dismissed by Kilmarnock, his arrival looked like the final roll of the dice. It was back to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191878,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":{"0":"post-191877","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-queens","12":"tag-queens-headlines","13":"tag-queens-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}