Reaction

Today was another bad day for the club as they tried to get themselves away from the wrong end of the league table. Prior to the game at Hampden Park manager Allan Maitland lost the services of Graeme Brown, whose wife had given birth to a new baby daughter, Aryn and Kyle MacAulay, who missed the game due to influenza. However the team was in good spirit and were confident of securing the club’s first victory over Queen’s Park at Hampden Park since a 4-0 victory on 22nd March, 1997. Although the first half ended goalless, Alloa were on top but needed to convert one of their chances in front of goal. At the start of the second half Alloa began to turn the screw and were in complete dominance, Iain Campbell fired a 25 yard shot which the home keeper brilliantly tipped over the bar and minutes later he produced another fantastic double save when he pushed a Brown Ferguson piledriver on to the crossbar and managed to get the rebound to safety. The first goal in today’s match was always going to be important, but once again it was a bad decision which cost Alloa dearly. A quickly taken free kick by Alloa went badly wrong and before they could react they had been caught out by a Queen’s breakaway which ended with Paul Harkins having a rare shot on goal by the home side which gave them the lead. Queen’s took a great lift from the goal, but even after this Alloa had chances to draw level, if not win the game – Brown Ferguson went close, Francis Kelly failed in front of goal after a great cross from David McClune and Chris Townsley had another opportunity. Know one could fault the players for effort but to get ourselves out of the relegation area the players will need to start being a lot more clinical in front of goal.

allan maitland after queen’s park game

I think it’s a game that we have dominated for long spells, their first shot at goal was after 70 minutes and I think their only other shot at goal was actually their goal on 75 minutes. Their goalkeeper, who was named “Man of the Match” had two fantastic saves and it was only our inability to score when we have had opportunities, and this has again killed us. We have had the situation where we lose what I consider to be a bad goal, it’s just a simple thing, it was a free kick for us on the half way line – we made the wrong choice, and then having made the wrong choices we needed to stop the game, we don’t do that and Queens break up the park and score. From their two shots at goal they score and for all our efforts at goal we cannot score. That for me is a situation that leads you into a relegation dog fight. At the moment, after eight games and only four points that is exactly where we are and that is what I am telling the players now – they can forget all about their aspirations of winning leagues or whatever else and we have to consider going to Brechin and start taking points wherever we can, if we are not going to score goals we must make sure that other teams don’t score goals against us. I thought defensively we were good today, in the second half we created plenty of chances, but players need to do better. Their goal keeper pulled off two wonderful saves from Iain Campbell and Brown Ferguson at the start of the second half but we had other opportunities when Andy Ferguson and later in the game Francis Kelly and Chris Townsley had chances to score, we have to score at least one of them or possibly two of them as the case may be. It’s very difficult to take a defeat on a day like this and I don’t think Queen’s Park played well so our problem is we are playing against teams who play better than us and beat us. We are now playing against teams that don’t play better than us and they are beating us. We need to get a spark from somewhere that is going to change that. I expected us to win today and I think over the 90 minutes we did enough to win the game however, when you pick up the paper tomorrow it’s not going to say that Alloa won it will say we got beat yet again and are now sitting bottom of the league. I have tried various things to change with the personnel we have got but maybe the solution now is just to forget about trying to play football and the solution now is to become big, strong and physical and just batter away and see if we can win points. When you get an opportunity to take a point from a game you take it and when you get a chance to take all three points from a set piece, or be it a corner kick or free kick, maybe we do that until we get our season back up and running. We have tried everything else at the moment –we have tried to play as many flair players as we possibly can, we have had two wide players attacking today, we have got two strikers attacking and the midfield players supporting as much as they can and we still don’t score a goal so we need to look at maybe stop losing so many goals and see if we can sort it that way. Graeme Brown missed the game after the birth of his daughter Aryn, while Kyle MacAulay was at home after calling off with influenza.