Management thoughts on a loss at Easthouses and the end of a long run.

Posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2011

Mike says –

“First of all Sam and I would like to thank those players who’ve played for the senior side for the last few years for an unbelievable away record which ended yesterday. Easthouses late winner signalled an end to a competitive unbeaten away run which goes back to April 2009 at Saughton Enclosure. I suppose with a couple of months of away games it was liable to happen some time soon but that doesn’t make it any easier to take.

That’s our third game and if we played well in the first half at The Vale, the full game at Kelso we only really played anything like ourselves in the second half yesterday. Davie went 2 up and Borthwick and Boggie caused us problems all day though they saw much less of the ball after the break. We can have no complaints about the result because after Scott Fusco got his third goal in three games 2 minutes into the second half we created and passed up quite a few opportunities to put the game beyond the home side. With us trying to force a win and the home side looking to maybe settle for a draw we were caught with a sucker punch. Before the game I warned our lot that Easthouses had a bigger squad this season, were playing with a lot more confidence and were my pick to come up to the Premier League come the end of the season. Nothing I saw over the 90 minutes changed that thought.

For ourselves we’ll have to win our last two (away) games to have any chance of progressing to the knock-out stages. With Ali MacKinnon and Danny O’Donnell all stitched up and with Stewart Fowlie in China we had fewer options in central defence than we’d normally have. Kevin Sivewright will benefit from the game after his holiday and Dr Jon has still to get back into the routine of training and playing EOS football. They will both get sharper but I’m not singling them out as one or two of our players looked uncomfortable on a pitch which was too wet to cut last week (few weeks) and wasn’t conducive to a short passing game.   

It was the same for both teams and we know we can play better. As I’ve said before the season starting with a League Cup section is a great way to ease yourself into the season. Maybe we’re taking things just a bit too easy?”

Mike