Reaction

The Wasps suffered their first home defeat this season in the league, going down 1-0 to Arbroath, the second 1-0 defeat in a row for Allan Maitland’s team. A penalty awarded after 28 minutes when John Grant handled a net bound Ian Dobbins shot, which resulted in a red card for the Alloa midfield player and an opportunity, which Bryan Scott took to open the scoring in this match. On a day when Alloa had already had their options depleted due to injury it was then an up hill task. Although Alloa did well in the second period Arbroath were content to hit on the break and had opportunities themselves to increase their lead, however with time added on young 16 year old substitute Jason Thomson was unfortunate not to snatch a point for the club when he struck the cross bar. On the day too many injuries were to cost the team dear, we need all players available and not out injured, to keep our momenteum going and to avoid inconsisent results.

allan maitland after arbroath defeat

We were obviously disappointed to lose the game, but I thought our effort from our players with ten men was excellent, we had to keep our shape and play percentage football and hopefully at some stage in the game you would get that opportunity, unfortunately for us that opportunity came in the 91st minute of the game and we hit the bar with it. The disappointing thing was how we started the game, before Arbroath went ahead with the penalty kick, they had three good opportunities before the penalty, we changed it to go three up front and looked to be getting a grip of the game just before they were awarded the penalty kick, we didn’t defend the goal well and I think John Grant was a little unlucky to be sent off but the referee has no choice, it was a handball on the line, then once we were down to ten men with so many other players also missing, then the game becomes really difficult and I think that is exactly what happened today.

It was asking an awful lot of a team to dig in a game when – Iain Russell, Kevin Welsh, Brian Carrigan, David McClune and Dougie Wilson all out of the team, we need these players fit, so we will need to dig in for the next couple of weeks, get all these guys back, give us options and go and play from there, disappointed with the result but no qualms about effort , the effort was great but we just lacked that wee bit of quality which was sitting in the stand today.