Management thoughts on the King Cup Semi Final

Posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010

Mike says –

“Tomorrow we play the first of two semi finals in 4 days at the Academy. It’s the players job to concentrate on Heriot-Watt and the job at hand but Sam and I will take Tuesday into consideration when picking the team. That is because as I’ve said on here many many times, the quality of our squad is such that we have 13 or 14 players of equal ability and Sam and I are happy to field any 11 from that 14.

Back to Heriot-Watt and a very difficult afternoon ahead.  Michael kept his players in the home dressing room for a while after our game at Riccarton on 27th March as they dissected a very strange game. We are generally slow starters but that day we came out the traps and scored twice early in both halves which decided the game. For long spells before and after the interval there was little between the teams but the damage had been done and the points heading to Ainslie Park. Tomorrow I’m sure we will have to work a lot harder for any goals we score.

Keith Anderson reminded me yesterday that the students are the holders of the King Cup and add to that the fact that they are one of only two teams who have scored 3 goals against us at the Academy this season and you can see they come here with plenty incentive and the knowledge they can cause us problems.

Sam and I will be hoping that whatever team we put out continues to show the consistency, commitment and ability we have shown for a couple of months now.

Finally we’d hoped to have David Etale back in our squad tomorrow as he has been back training with us for a few weeks. It seems however we’ll have to wait a little bit longer before David returns to our ranks. He’d set pre-season as his aim and it might be we just have to wait until then to have our talisman striker back in a Spartans strip”

Mike