Play-Off Final: Magnitude of game ‘massive’ says Skipper McFarland

Posted on Friday, May 19th, 2023

Spartans skipper Ian McFarland is a player who wears his heart on his sleeve.  The tough tackling, no nonsense midfielder is no stranger to achieving success in the Pyramid Play-Offs and the Club Captain is fully focused on guiding his team to the next level.

“To be honest, I know I’ve been in this position before in terms of play-off finals, but the magnitude of the game still holds up a lot with me.

“It’s the biggest game in the club’s history and myself and the rest of the boys are just raring to go for Saturday.  We’ve had two great training sessions this week and we’ll just need to see who is fit and firing to go and that’s all we can do really.”

McFarland, who joined in the summer of 2017 from Edinburgh City, has notched up 179 appearances during his Spartans career and this coming Saturday is undoubtedly the biggest yet.

“We came through two tricky ties against Brechin, the first with half of the game playing with 10 men, then the penalty shout out in the second leg in a game that really could have gone either way.  However, such is the character of the squad this year, we managed to dig deep and grind out the win.

“Saturday obviously saw us go a goal down, a wee bit of adversity as well, it’s not hampered us at all.  We came back in the second half and I thought a draw was more than deserved.  It’s good momentum to take into this final game.  For Albion Rovers I guess it will be the same.  They’ll be thinking they got a good hard draw against us at Ainslie Park and there really is everything to play for on Saturday.”

The 32 year old added, “We’ve got a really good bond in the changing room and I think that is reflected in the performances and successes we’ve achieved this season.”

Saturday’s game at the Reigart Stadium is sold-out.  Kick-off 3pm.  Follow the game via Twitter at @spartansfc