Reaction

Back to back victories against Brechin City and Raith Rovers at Recreation Park, albeit one was a Scottish Cup replay and the other in the League, showing on their day Alloa Athletic can still look to defeat anybody in their league. Brechin City took an early lead through their top scorer Gary Twigg, netting his 10th goal of the season, but two goals in a five minute burst saw the game turn on it’s head and Alloa take control, Andy Ferguson was on hand to score the equaliser before Dougie Wilson crossed for Jamie Stevenson to volley home the goal which was to be the winner. In the second half Brechin City started to show why they had only lost one previous game in the league this season and pushed Alloa deeper into defence. Late in the game Alloa keeper Raymond Jellema was their hero when he saved Iain Diack’s spot kick after Chris Townsley had been adjudged to have handled the ball. Three important points for “The Wasps” which were the perfect Christmas present.

allan maitland after brechin city win

I’m sure you have heard this before, but football’s a funny game, for the last three or four weeks we have played really well and not got an awful lot from the games but today I thought we played well for 20 minutes and the rest of the time Brechin City were the better team and played the game like a team at the top end of the league, particularly in the second half and should have won the game, so for me today’s victory made up for e.g. the East Fife game, when I thought we should have won, last week we had an hour of the game when we played really well, but our goal keeper today I thought was fantastic, having not done well last week I thought he done really well today. The penalty kick save was excellent but unfortunately we are not getting breaks – we have penalty incidents we don’t get and teams against us seem to get penalties quite easily. I’m not saying the referee was wrong but our players say to me that the referee said that he leant into it and Chris Townsley said “the ball was going to strike my arm so I leant forward and it hit me at the top of the shoulder – if I don’t move it was going to strike my arm and if I lean in the referee decides to give a penalty?”. We are just not getting these and it is going against us today and against East Fife but I am not here to criticise referees, I think their job is hard enough as it is. We are really relived to win – we are pleased to get ourselves 3 points in a game we maybe didn’t deserve it, we played really well here in the game against Raith Rovers in the Scottish Cup, we played decent last week, a great result today and now we need to try and replicate that next week against Stranraer, which is a massive game for us and then hopefully this way Alloa Athletic fans can enjoy their Christmas and hopefully next week we can give them something to enjoy their New Year. We played a very good Brechin City side who started the game much better than us, certainly finished the game a lot better than us and thankfully we had a 20 minute spell when Jinky, Andy Ferguson & Jamie Stevenson caused them a lot of problems, we are pleased with that, but let’s not take it away from Brechin City, they were the better side.