Burntisland Shipyard: Player unavailability severely hit our chances of staying up says secretary

"I think there’s been a lot of problems in terms of player availability,” Beveridge told the Fife Free Press.

"Whether that be suspension, injury or unavailability. We had a lot of suspensions at the start of the season, although towards the end of the season it wasn’t so bad, nothing more than any other club.

"Certainly we've had a few key players out injured for periods. Wee Craig Watt – who was playing at the back or in midfield – was out for three months and then he picked up another injury and missed the last two games.

"The same with big Iain Millar – who is about six feet five – he dislocated his collar bone and was out for six weeks coming towards the end of the season.

"Crucially for us he has a long throw but he couldn’t take the chance of using that in case he aggravated his injury.”

Beveridge said that the dressing room was ghostly silent post match on Saturday, when the club went down to the hugely damaging 4-1 home loss to Rosyth which condemned them to second division football next term.

The stalwart acknowledged that the fixture list on the final day – which saw drop rivals Coldstream and Lochore Welfare playing each other which meant that one of them would pick up at least a point whatever happened – had gone against his team.

“It would probably have been better going into the match where all three teams – Shippy, Coldstream and Lochore – could have lost,” he said.

"Us getting off to a pretty poor start on the day didn’t help. Give Rosyth credit, they played quite well. They seemed quite relaxed, stroked the ball around.

"We lost an own goal and the second goal wasn’t a clever one to lose either.

"We would say that the first two goals were highly avoidable but the third goal was a very good passing move from their own half, good finish.

"Then at 3-0 down we could have pulled a couple of goals back with a bit of luck.”