Aidan Connolly double helps earn second 3-0 home win on spin for Raith Rovers

That victory – secured by an Aidan Connolly double scored on 12 minutes and 32 and a Kyle Connell penalty just before half-time – might not have lifted the seventh-placed Fifers any higher up the Scottish Championship table, Dundee remaining in sixth place by dint of having scored more goals, but, on 19 points from 13 games, it takes them to within a point of their visitors and they remain two points off second place.

Another home fixture is next up for the Kirkcaldy side, second-bottom Hamilton Academical being their visitors at Stark’s Park this coming Saturday, with kick-off at 3pm.

Rovers boss Ian Murray credited teamwork for his side’s sixth victory of the season in front of a crowd of just short of 2,100, telling Raith TV afterwards: “It was an excellent performance from the team today, a real big team performance.

“There was fantastic football all over the park. It’s very difficult to pick a player who achieved more than others.

“We can look at the goals Aidan scored and they were quality goals, we can look at Kyle Connell’s work-rate, up front on his own as a young player coming in on loan, but overall all over the park I thought we were excellent – really, really good, really solid, really confident in taking the ball from the back and passing it really firmly and crisply.

“We got goals at great times as well. Aidan’s strike was fantastic in the first 12 minutes, and then we got a goal out of nothing really thanks to a long throw and then a penalty kick just before half-time which really calmed everybody down and changed the whole dynamics of our half-time team talks for myself and for Ian McCall.

“In the second half, I felt we worked incredibly hard and showed an appetite to defend and real resilience and we got a deserved win.

“The group of players we have are such intelligent players. They’ve got good quality. There are no prima donnas. There are no stars in this team, which is great, Everybody likes football stars and stuff like that but we’re a team and that showed in our whole performance. It was an incredibly impressive team performance.

“I can’t speak highly enough of the players today and for the last five or six weeks.”

Scoring further goals after the half-time break would have seen Raith go above Dundee in the table, both being on goal differences of plus-three, but Murray was happy enough for his side to see the game out without adding to the scoreline.

“We didn’t need to score any more goals. I made that very clear at half-time,” he said.

“We’d love to have won by a bigger margin and moved up a place in the league and got our goal difference higher, but at the end of the day, it’s still quite early in the season. We’d made a fantastic platform in the first half to move forward from and we decided as a group that we’ll come back in here at full-time at 3-0.

“If somebody had offered us 3-0 before the game at home to a very good championship side, we’d have bitten their hand off.”