Management thoughts on Fernieside tomorrow

Posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010

Mike says -

“On Tuesday when the players came in to training there were two enlarged match reports attached to the home dressing room wall at the Academy. One covered our home league encounter with Tynecastle on 29th August and was entitled “Tynecastle make out of sorts Spartans suffer”. The other covered Tynecastle’s last game a couple of weeks ago at Meadowbank Stadium and it didn’t have a headline as such. The top of the report however read “Edinburgh City 1 Tynecastle 5″.

Should Sam and myself have to motivate our lot tomorrow? I hope not.

We have played 22 games so far this season – won 17, drawn 1 and lost 4. In three of our four losses we didn’t play that badly and on another day could have won or drawn. The other loss was against Tynecastle where we failed to turn up. Now that result was partially because of the skill and commitment of the opposition but it was also down to a dreadful display by the majority of those in Spartans colours. Tomorrow we have a squad of players who have something to prove to a recently promoted team who turned up at the Academy in late August expecting an examination of their abilities by the Premier League champions.  Need I say more.

The task in hand is a difficult one. The 5-1 scoreline against City surprised everybody in East of Scotland football but it shouldn’t have. People have spoken for months about 3 potential league winners this season – Lothian, Whitehill and ourselves. Under the radar have slipped the new kids on the block from Fernieside but it’s not lost on me that if they win their games in hand they go above Lothian into second place. 4 teams can now win the Premier title this season and believe me, Tynecastle are one of them.

We didn’t play badly at Selkirk last Saturday but we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought we played well. A surface which cut up and stubborn defending from the home team didn’t help but the truth is we didn’t fire on all cylinders. We will change things around a bit tomorrow without losing the shape our direction of the team.

There are only 6 leagues left for ourselves and each and every game is as important as the other. The 6 games are 6 cup finals and Sam and I will use the very talented core of our squad across these 6 games.

Tomorrow should be a belter of a game and I can’t wait for it.”

Mike