Pressley monitoring free-agent market to strengthen Dundee squad

Steven Pressley will continue monitoring the free-agent market with a view to strengthening his Dundee squad.

The Dark Blues added Yan Dhanda, Cameron Congreve and Ethan Hamilton last month, but there were no further additions in the closing days of the transfer window.

After a testing start to the campaign, however, Pressley is still open to adding to his squad if a suitable player becomes available.

“We are,” he said when asked at his media briefing on Thursday if he was still assessing the market. “But at this point there’s nothing that has stood out to us or makes us think that that would be the right choice.

“So there’s no real progression around that, but we are looking at it at present.”

Dundee have taken just two points from their four William Hill Premiership games so far, but Pressley remains confident things will improve.

“I think like any manager, we’re always optimistic about the start of the season but I’m also a realist,” he said. “If you look back at the Hibernian game, we were struggling to put a team out there.

“Now, slowly but surely, we’ve managed to get players in the building and look a little bit stronger, a little bit better, but it takes time to integrate the players.

“Also, integrating the players during the season is much harder than integrating them in a pre-season.

“We’re now integrating players into an environment where it’s harsh and we need to win games, so it’s not so easy to manoeuvre and change the style of play but we’re working very hard on that.

“The previous weekend without us having a game has given us a lot of time on the training ground so we’ve worked hard and tried to improve on especially the offensive aspects where we haven’t been particularly good in the first four games. We want to improve on that.”