Reaction

Victory over Neale Cooper’s Peterhead at Recreation Park on Saturday, kept “The Wasps” good run going, even although some media stations managed to get the scoreline wrong, after Andy Scott had deservedly scored the winner with eleven minutes left. In the first half Alloa played some of their best football of the season and although Stuart Noble opened the scoring in 29 minutes, “The Wasps” should have made their first half dominance pay with more goals. peterhead showed how dangerous a team they can be when, Nicky Clark equalised on 34 minutes. However substitute Paul Emslie received a straight red card only seven minutes after replacing Neil McVitie, which did not help Peterhead. This victory puts the Wasps eight points ahead of the chasing pack, a position which leaves others clubs with games in hand but they now must win to catch Allan Maitland’s team.

allan maitland after peterhead victory

I thought we played really well today, particularly in the first half, we are not finding any nerves because we are at the top of the table, at the moment what I find is that we are thriving on it – we struggled against Arbroath and we scored a late goal and that gave us a huge lift and since then we have played really well, our football in the first half was fantastic we scored a magnificent goal – it was a really good finish by Stuart Noble , great pass by Bryan Prunty he hits it that early their goalkeeper didn’t get time to react. In the second half I felt the goal was coming, Bryan Prunty had a great chance, Andy Scott had a chance and obviously John Grant had the chance which he just put over the bar. In fairness to Peterhead, down to ten men, I think the sending off was the right decision, they still came here and tried to play, I thought Nicky Clark played really well for them and their one chance they had in the whole game they scored with. The second goal was vital for us – Stuart Noble won the man of the match and I can understand that but for me Andy Scott was a really big player for us today he set up chances for us, we were missing them – so he decided to go up the park and score himself. We have that threat now with Mark Gilhaney, Andy Scott, Stuart Noble, Bryan Prunty and David Gormley – so we have goals in our team. I couldn’t be more pleased, I felt today we played really well – everybody talks about the advantage we have because we have played our games but you need to win them. We have the same games as everyone else for the rest of the month – in effect we have four Tuesdays to play in March but in April we won’t have the games to catch up with. We have a good squad here – Kevin Welsh and Marc McCafferty should both be available for Tuesday night – they both had a virus today. Scot Buist had to come off at half time with an injury and is likely to miss Tuesday but we are in good shape going into a hard run of games and I am absolutely delighted. We felt pressure when we were playing Arbroath at home and didn’t manage to score until the closing seconds of the game, that was a different type of pressure for Alloa as people were starting to expect the team to win games. I don’t feel that pressure now because the team believe in themselves and that we will score goals – if we loose a goal we know we are capable of going and scoring another goal and that has made the difference. The gap is now growing and the pressure is on everybody else now – that’s exactly how I would like it to be.