MORTON hit the road tomorrow as they try to break their duck against Dunfermline Athletic at the third time of asking this season.

Dougie Imrie's men made it 11 games unbeaten last Saturday as they laboured to a 3-0 victory over Arbroath at Cappielow.

This superb sequence has lifted them all the way from the bottom of the league to fourth place, which would be good enough come May for a promotion play-off place.

It has been a stunning transformation and Imrie, his assistant Andy Millen and the players deserve a huge amount of credit for the way they have gone about their work over the last couple of months.

Greenock Telegraph:

With their injury crisis all but a distant memory, the team have handsomely vindicated their manager's insistence that things would turn, and served notice that they are a force to be reckoned with.

The win last weekend opens up an 11-point gap between them and the foot of the division and while there is clearly still work to do to build a bridge away from the teams beneath them, they can perhaps now start to look up the way.

Partick Thistle currently sit eight points above them in third position but Ton hold a game in hand over the Maryhill men and in the form they are in at the moment they will believe they have a chance of reeling them in.

The start to 2024 couldn't have gone any better for the Greenock outfit.

In addition to their continued climb up the second tier, they have also advanced into the last 16 of the Scottish Cup and will bank a useful sum after their forthcoming home tie against Motherwell was selected by the BBC for live coverage on television.

Off the park the good news just keeps coming, with Imrie agreeing a new contract extension until the end of season 2025-26 and a number of his players secured on new deals.

The challenge now is for the club to build on that feelgood factor over the coming months and hopefully add a few more regulars onto the gate at Sinclair Street in the process.

Ton will be in for a tough test tomorrow as they cross the Forth for the clash at East End Park to meet a Pars side which has already got the better of them twice this season, although they are clearly a different beast now from back then.

Despite the full-house Dunfermline have obtained with those results, they still sit five points adrift of their visitors and will want to start making inroads into that deficit as we move into what could be an important month.

The Fifers look like a side potentially open to a degree of improvement in the second half of the campaign.

They came up from League 1 in buoyant mood after cantering to the title and James McPake has a more than decent squad at his disposal.

Yet it's fair to say that their season hasn't really caught fire and if you look at the two promoted clubs, while Airdrie have exceeded expectations up until this point the Pars would probably feel the opposite way about their campaign.

They are currently on a six-match winless run but their most recent result will be cause for encouragement, with a solid 0-0 draw recorded against Dundee United at Tannadice.

Morton should certainly view them as a live threat to their current undefeated sequence - along with the history books.

The stats experts at the SPFL this week revealed that in the last 40 years, Ton have had no fewer than nine separate unbeaten runs of exactly 11 matches...and on each occasion they have lost their twelfth.

To defy the trend they will certainly have to put in an improved level of performance than they produced against both Montrose and Arbroath.

Greenock Telegraph:

They made heavy weather of both wins and were quite rightly left under no illusion by the manager that he demands better of them.

This hard-taskmaster approach has been one of the key factors behind the turnaround Imrie has presided over since taking the reins in late 2021.

He has swept away the downtrodden take-what-you-can-get mentality that had prevailed around the club for far too long, been ambitious at every turn and sought to lift standards from the day he walked through the door.

It has been a breath of fresh air to witness and made a huge difference.

He was far from happy with the "really poor" first half performance against Arbroath last weekend and felt his side got out of jail somewhat with the manner they eventually got the job done against a side which had been reduced to 10 men early in the match.

Greenock Telegraph:

More will be required of them tomorrow, both individually and collectively.

Dunfermline will have had an injection of confidence from their steely show on Tayside and will be targeting three points at home to back up that good share of the spoils.

This looks like being a typically hard-fought Championship clash and if it takes a point to keep the pot boiling for Ton then all things considered that would be classed by most people as a good result.