Reaction

Alloa Athletic did all they could in their final league game by beating Cowdenbeath 3-1 only to lose the Championship on goal difference. Having had our fate in our own hands with four games to go, the season now goes all the way to the Promotion Play Offs, if “The Wasps” are to join Stirling Albion in Division One next season. The game is all about ifs and buts, but as the game ended at Recreation Park on Saturday, it was agony awaiting the four final minutes of playing time at Glebe Park knowing a goal for Brechin City would bring the trophy to Recreation Park. We now must take this performance into the play offs and if we show that level of commitment, hopefully we will still progress through Play Offs, although devasted to lose title on goal difference the players are still determined to clinch promotion through the play offs.

Wednesday 5th May at Central Park Cowdenbeath  v. Alloa Athletic (7.45pm)

Saturday 8th May at Recreation Park Alloa Aletic v. Cowdenbeath (3.00pm)

Play Off Semi Finals will be played in two legs.

allan maitland after title heartbreak

I would like to start first and foremost by congratulating Stirling Albion, the team that wins the league is always the team that deserves it and they have just been that bit better than us this year. Congratulations to Allan Moore and all his team and everyone associated with Stirling Albion. From our point of view I look at our season and I look back to 5 years ago when we were in the relegation play offs and I think that season we ended up with 32 points and now this season we are in the promotion play offs on 65 points so the difference in the last 5 years has been huge for me, we are making strides in the right direction and now have two massive games against a really good Cowdenbeath side who caused us lots of problems today – and they had the luxury of resting some of their players – Gareth Wardlaw, Paul McQuade and Joe Mbu. They will obviously be fresh for Wednesday nights game whereas we have now Stuart Noble, Scot Buist and Mark Gilhaney, all really struggling for the game after picking up injuries today – unfortunately we will not be in great shape for the game with Brown Ferguson and Mark Brown struggling as well– people are asking will we be down after not winning the league – and the answer to that is quite simply no – I think we have done our bit today, we have got ourselves into a situation where we are back to winning football matches which is vital, I think the other thing is that when we look at our season we feel as though we have had a really good season we slipped up the last three games and I accept that but to be fair I thought we played reasonably well at Peterhead, but not picking up points in previous three games has cost us. We now have something else to look forward to, we have a completely new challenge and we need to make sure that we are ready for that. I am delighted with the players today, I thought that Andy Scott in particular was excellent, Bryan Prunty was superb as well. If we can just keep putting the ball into dangerous areas we will go on and see if we can get ourselves into the final. The last thing I would say is that young Jamie Hay came on today, he has been out on loan to Bo’ness for most of the season, he came in today and I thought he made a huge difference for us, with good energy, got on the ball, made passes, didn’t seem to have any of the anxiety that other people had and helped us enormously. Motivation is a funny thing to talk about – it has to come from within and if you had seen us playing the last three weeks you wouldn’t have thought that we were motivated. We shouldn’t have needed any more motivation than the opportunity to win the league and we have only really started playing in that vain in the last 25 minutes of today’s game. From our point of view I don’t see motivation as being a problem during the play offs. We have done our bit and won our game again and hopefully that has got the bad spell out of the way. I am pleased with the players, pleased for everybody, but disappointed not to win the league – it’s always difficult when you lose out on goal difference but from our point of view the most important thing was that we won today – if we had lost and they had won the league if we hadn’t done our bit – that would have been worse. I was pleased with the players today.