The 21-year-old – who is in his first season as a full-time footballer – has cemented a starting spot in the Doonhamers’ line-up over the past four weeks.
The ex-Queens Park player assisted Willie Gibson’s spectacular winner for the Dumfries side against Dunfermline last Saturday and is confident the team can continue their string of impressive results.
McGrory said: “This is my first season in the Championship and full-time, it’s been a good learning experience. I’ve only ever been part time before coming here and I’ve enjoyed it. All you want to do when you’re younger is to play football and I get to do that.
“I can 100 per cent feel a big improvement in my fitness and the technical side of the game. When you play alongside talented players and a good manager you can only keep improving.
“It’s been a good run of form, the team has changed a lot recently because of injuries. I took my chance when I came in and obviously the team is playing well. There’s a lot of good midfielders in the squad and I’ve been learning off them and listening to what they’ve been telling me. I took my chance and got involved in a winning team, so I’m happy.”
The youngster had an indifferent start to his Palmerston career since his arrival during the close season and was sidelined with an injury after he cracked his ribs against the Pars earlier in the season.
McGrory missed five weeks of action, waited patiently for his chance and is now loving life at the club who are in contention for a promotion play-off spot.
“After the first nine games it wasn’t a good start for us and we were bottom but now we’re in the promotion play-offs and looking up the way. Hopefully by the end of the season we are still competing for those places.
“It’s so hard to say what the transformation of form has been because we haven’t been doing much differently. We’ve been believing in ourselves and work really hard on and off the ball. When we get the ball, we’re really dangerous on the counterattack, we’ve brought in some really good attacking options and everyone is fearing playing us at the minute.”
McGrory and his teammates face Dick Campbell’s Arbroath at Gayfield on Saturday. The two sides – who were tipped to be fighting relegation – have been the two in form teams in 2021 and McGrory believes Queens can pick up another positive result.
He said: “They are in a good run of form, so we know we have to be at it again. I think Queens and Arbroath are the two best form teams in the division just now and that goes to show how competitive this league is.
“It’ll be a different sort of game from the Dunfermline game. They had more of the ball but we’ll probably get more of it next week at Gayfield. We know if we can play the same way we have been doing we can leave with the points.”
Meanwhile, Queens announced the loan signing of central midfielder Ciaran Dickson this week.
The 18-year-old joins Palmerston Park from Premiership leaders Rangers until the end of the season.
