Reaction

The points were shared at Gayfield on Saturday which was probably about right. The Wasps had a great chance to open the scoring after only 16 minutes when ex Alloa defender, Colin Hamilton fouled PJ Crossan in the box but Scott Taggart’s penalty was saved by his ex teammate David Hutton who guessed correctly and then pulled off a great double save to deny Kris Renton.

Indeed the Arbroath keeper was again centre of attention when he let slip a Iain Flannigan free kick into the box and the ball deflected off luckless defender David Gold to give Alloa the lead.

However it was the keeper would pick up the plaudits after a string of saves, none better than his save from Jon Robertson’s long range effort and then point blank from PJ Crossan, which was to earn him Sponsors “Man of the Match” award.

jim goodwin at stair park

Obviously disappointed, I didn’t think there was much in the game up until the first goal, we said at half time the first goal was going to be huge and more often than not in our league that tends to be the case. Really disappointed with the defending, I thought we could have done a whole lot better, we seemed to be all over the place and one ball over the top is what killed us, but a great finish from Ryan Wallace but it was avoidable from our point of view. I don’t mind teams scoring goals where they carve you open, good quality goals but I don’t think that was a good quality goal from our point of view. He might have been half a yard offside but I think it was the fact we were disjointed at the back in the back four, three of the boys were up and one was too deep. We spoke before the game about not giving them the space to run into because we knew what they would want to do, we know how they play, looking for balls in behind because they have boys who are quick, as a back four we needed to deny them that space and we didn’t do it, but a great finish from the lad.

At 1-0 with fifteen minutes to go I made some changes to try and get us just back in the game, we went 3-4-3 but then again Jamie Hamill had too much space to run into, it’s a learning curve for wee Adam because he has to do his defensive responsibilities as well – for whatever reason we just don’t seem to be getting any breaks just now. We need to create our own luck, we need to keep going, it’s a funny league it’s the kind of league if you can put two or three wins back to back all of a sudden you will be climbing up the table again but our current form hasn’t been good enough and that’s absolutely clear and I take full responsibility for that.

You can’t feel sorry for yourselves, we are disappointed, I believe in the group of players we have, we have players now coming back after injury and once we get everybody up to speed I’m sure our luck will turn, I look at other teams squads and we are right up there on paper but it doesn’t work like that, at the moment we need to do more collectively, myself included we are all in this together and the only way we will turn the corner is by working hard during the week and not feeling sorry for ourselves because we will have another tough game coming up next weekend so we need to dust ourselves down and go again on Tuesday and hopefully our luck will change.

This form that we are in at the moment cannot continue, that is the first quarter out of the way and we are sitting on nine points from nine games , I’m not stupid, we sit and analysis’ things including myself and my decisions, tactics and training, I do that more than anybody and I am my own worst critic and I know our return of points in the first quarter is not nearly good enough and we are going to half to double that next quarter if we are to have any aspirations of getting into the play-offs.

We appear to be lacking a bit of confidence at the moment due to some bad form but I believe we are one result from turning the corner, it’s as simple as that.