MARK REYNOLDS

“It is great to be back.

“It is the longest layoff I have had in my professional career. It was not nice. You take for granted just how much you enjoying playing games and enjoy being part of a winning team.

“So it has been nice the last couple of weeks to be back training with the boys. The goal for the last 14 weeks has been to get back into contention for a starting spot and I have now done that. 

“From a personal point of view, I have just had my second child, a little boy so it meant I was able to see him all day and spend time with the family. But professionally it was horrendous watching games. It was even harder watching how well the team were doing and seeing the buzz about the place. I felt a bit like an outsider. 

“I am delighted for the boys and the fact they have got us to where we are now but it was hard not being part of it.

“Sometimes in life you need a little setback to realise how good you have got it.

“The same happened for me at Sheffield. I went from playing every minute of every game at Motherwell and then went down south and realised that is not always the done thing. You can’t always get to play every week. Then I came back to Scotland and came here and was fortunate enough to play every game again. So to miss the three months that I did was hard but I managed to fill my time. I did a bit of commentating on RedTV to keep myself busy and to keep me in and around the club.

“We have great physio’s here and I was lucky that I had a great surgeon who performed the operation. I had a lot of confidence in them so you just have to listen to what they are telling you. As soon as they said it was good to go I was more than happy to get in amongst it again. I played in the U20s game last week. It was good to go get through a game situation and feel that it (the injury) was as strong as they were telling me. That got rid of any fear factor. Any concerns I had (about the injury) certainly have been away the last two weeks in training. 

“I am not sure if I will play tomorrow night, even if I did know I would not tell you! But I am just glad to be back in contention and to be talked about as being back in contention. 

“The international break has allowed us to get together as a team and work together on things that needed working on in training. As a player though you just want to get back out there to right that wrong. You want to get back onto the pitch to win the three points.

“The St Johnstone results was horrendous. There is no hiding from that but we are still the same group of boys, we still have the same players who went and put that winning run of games together at the start of the season.

“This last week we have done what we always do, gone and isolated ourselves from the outside world – the players, the manger, the coaches and the staff in and around the stadium. There is a positivity amongst each other and that is all that concerns us.

“We have had these bad results but we are still top of the league.

“You are probably fed up hearing us say this but we just take one game at a time. That has always been the way since the manager came in and that is always going to be the way. We are just focussed on those three points tomorrow night.”