Management thoughts on the Ormiston Challenge tomorrow.

Posted on Friday, November 12th, 2010

Mike says -

“The South of Scotland Challenge Cup is the biggest domestic trophy we can win and as holders we want to make sure it is still sitting on the cabinet in our committee room after tomorrow’s game with Ormiston. For it to remain there our players have to keep their collective eye’s on the ball and put two games to the back of their minds.

We beat Ormiston quite comfortably in a pre-season friendly at Peffermill but that’s what it was, a friendly where both teams experimented with line-ups and the levels of fitness differed throughout as players returned from holiday. The second game the players should ignore takes place next Saturday at the Academy and will take care of itself. 

One East of Scotland result so far this season has caught the eye more than any other and it was Ormiston 4 Whitehill Welfare 1 in an earlier round of this competition. If anything should help concentrate the mind of our boys it’s that scoreline. My old friend Murray Cheyne and his players will come here with nothing to lose and everything to gain as both teams try to progress to the all-in stage with the South representatives.

We really missed not playing last week. We were going to use the Selkirk and tomorrow’s game to keep as many of our small squad match fit before the big one as possible. We also wanted to keep the momentum building after our best performance of the season against the Edinburgh students. The rain saw that didn’t happen and Sam and I were worried men when we saw the state of the pitch on Tuesday. Since then Colin Hutchison has had two separate pitch consultants at the Academy working on the drainage. We are all keeping our fingers crossed.

We hope to have a full squad to choose from tomorrow and Sam and I will pick the team based on the fitness levels of the players.  We want the starting eleven and the substitutes  going into the Shire game as match fit as possible and we will be picking the team on that premise. For those wishing to play in the Scottish, good performances over the 90 minutes (or more) tomorrow are vital. Let’s all just hope the rain abates and we have a better Saturday afternoon than last week.”

Mike