East of Scotland side travel to Berwick

Posted on Friday, August 23rd, 2013

Tomorrow we travel to Berwick Rangers EOS for a League Cup fixture which provides us with an opportunity to meet up again with Mark Lamb and Jimmy Rae the ex-management team of our Junior Side, previously Jimmy also played with Spartans and still turns out for our Old Boys Team.

I am led to believe that the playing surface at Berwick is in excellent condition and we are very much looking forward to the game. Last Saturday I thought that we were a bit taken aback with the surroundings at Coldstream with the playing surface actually being part of a public park however for me that just re-enforces how lucky our players are having the fantastic facilities at Ainslie Park to play on. The game itself was interesting as we tried to play our passing game on a very uneven playing surface, this proved to be slightly difficult and perhaps we should have changed our style of play to suit both the conditions and surface, that said Coldstream were very effective in the way in which they play they have a very quick player on the left side and a strong robust centre forward who they look to hit with the ball for him to hold it up. Defensively I thought that we could have done better as we lost the first goal directly from our own corner kick and with three defenders back I thought we could have avoided conceding the goal in the manner in which we did. We did level the game before half time with Robbie Laird slotting home a penalty after a hand ball in the box resulting from a shot by Hayden Crane. At half time we got the players re-grouped and focussed to go out and compete and keep things tight for a period until the game settled down, unfortunately the second half was only 3 minutes old and we conceded yet another poor goal from slack defensive play, then midway through the half we conceded a penalty kick which was duly dispatched by Coldstream, then with 10 minutes to go we were awarded another penalty when Lee Zavaroni was dragged down inside the box again Robbie Laird stepped up to tuck the ball into the back of the net, we then applied some pressure to the home goal in attempt to take something out of the game but it was to no avail as the game ended 3-2 to Coldstream and we faced the long journey back up the road to Edinburgh.

Hopefully we have learned some valuable lessons from the game something which we can take into tomorrow’s clash with Berwick.

For tomorrow’s game we are still unable to select a team from our full squad as we are still without the services of Kiddo whose injury is only now beginning to shows signs of recovery, Connor, Lucasz & Hayden all miss the game with Robbo and Chris available this week. We will have a couple of trialist’s with us tomorrow as at this stage it is still unclear when Matty will make a return to the team from his niggling abdomen injury.

Team selection for tomorrow will not be easy tomorrow as we try to juggle things around to ensure we are as strong as possible in key areas of the park Darren, Ricky, Brian and I will sit down again tomorrow and decide what the best line up for the match is and then we just need the players to go out and believe in themselves as have the confidence in them to get a result down at Berwick.