| The Dark Blues are averaging less than a goal a game and that explains why they are going into this fixture a point behind the First Division leaders.
O’Brien, though, believes that will change soon and is hoping Livi will be the first side to suffer the full wrath of the Dens strike force this season.
“The lack of goals is a bit worrying, but, when we think about the chances we’ve been making, we know we are not far away,” he said.
“Maybe it just needs a deflection or something like that for one to go in and then we’ll start scoring. There are certainly goals in the team — you just have to look at what Mikael Antoine-Curier, Colin McMenamin and Bob Davidson have done before to see that.”
Even when the fact Livi are something of an unknown quantity under new Italian boss Roberto Landi is added to the lack of goals, O’Brien sees no reason to change his opinion of tomorrow’s clash as one Dundee should be winning.
“They’ve got their new manager and he’ll probably have some different ideas, and there’s a few foreign boys joined them,” he added.
“We’ll have had them watched a few times and be told some of what they’ll do, but it is a game where we don’t know exactly what to expect.
“It’s at Dens, though, and that means we will be looking to win it. With the players we have and our crowd behind us, that goes for every game we play here.
“We were disappointed we did not do that against Dunfermline and, looking back, I still can’t believe we didn’t win that game.”
With Eric Paton and Craig McKeown shaking off knocks, boss Alex Rae has the option of going with the team that dominated, but failed to score, against the Pars last week.
However, Colin Cameron and Colin McMenamin both staked strong claims for starting places after showing up well against Hamilton behind closed doors on Wednesday.
Jim Lauchlan, meanwhile, was travelling to Leeds today for an operation on an abductor muscle which will keep him sidelined for another six weeks. |
