Reaction

Saturday at Borough Briggs facing Elgin City was to be a historic day for the club, the first time the clubs had met in a competitive league fixture but ended for “The Wasps” a game in which we did ourselves absolutely no favours, we never got going in difficult conditions and allowed Elgin City to get ahead far too easily. However nobody could have for seen what was to turn the game in a three minute spell prior to half-time. Although we had been far from our best we still had a lot of possession in the first half but had no penetration, Elgin were far more direct and shot on sight, their second goal came out of the blue and the third on half time was horrendous defending which resulted in Mark Docherty pulling back Brian Cameron and a penalty and sending off. That left “The Wasps” a mountain to climb in the second half. The game was finished in the 56th minute when referee Barry Cook awarded Elgin a 2nd penalty after Craig Gunn had clashed with Scott Bain which looked harsh. Elgin scored their fourth goal of the game but Scott Bain persisted in arguing with the officials and foolishly added to the teams woes by being red carded. Now down to 9 players from there on in it was backs to the walls and damage limitation, all credit to Elgin City they took advantage of the situation and scored a 5th goal. Alloa Athletic need to take the result on the chin and learn from this result, regardless of who we are playing you have to give yourself a chance in the game and we didn’t do that at Elgin and suffered badly. Not since 23rd September, 1995 have we lost a Third Division fixture 5-0, on that occasion we lost to Inverness Caledonian Thistle at home.

paul hartley after black day in elgin

We didn’t deserve anything from the game, that’s for sure, the two sending offs killed us -If you don’t start the game well you get punished and we didn’t start it well, credit to Elgin they deserved the victory – we have to regroup, forget about this, take the break next week and then look forward to the next game. We need to get this game and result out of our system as quick as we can. We will be working hard on Tuesday at training, we will need to learn from this defeat– it’s disappointing and you learn a lot about your players after a bad result and I am sure I will learn a lot about the players over the next couple of weeks. The second sending off was disappointing it was silly – you cannot do that if you are on a yellow card, you cannot have a go at the referee and he knows that but it gives Craig McDowall a chance to come back into the side – this happens in football, I will speak to those that have been on the bench and frustrated at not being in the squad they will get their chance now and that is what happens in the game – we get two sending offs which killed our chance but we made in so easy for Elgin, we can do so much better than that, we let ourselves and the fans down.