Glenrothes FC player/boss Stuart Cargill on second half collapse v Penicuik Athletic
Glenrothes FC player/manager Stuart Cargill has been explaining the second half ‘drop off in standards’ which cost his team dearly in last Saturday’s 4-1 home East of Scotland Football League loss to Penicuik Athletic.
Level at 1-1 at half-time after Cooper Thompson’s header from a corner cancelled out Greg Binnie’s penalty opener for Cuikie, Glens were put to the sword after the interval with further visitors’ goals via Ryan Baptie’s free-kick, a second Binnie penalty and then the same player completing his hat-trick with a tap in.
“I thought we were the better team in the first half but standards dropped off in the second half,” Cargill said. “We are trying to get the balance right by giving the players a bit of information but not too much. First and foremost we want to stay in this league but in the long term we want to impart our ideas.
"We decided to go after them at the start and it worked well. But I don’t know if we just ran out of energy later and we were caught napping at a quick free-kick that we gave away and they got in and scored.
"And that just about summed up the second half. We also had Ryan McInnes – who's 35 now – playing in central midfield, but he hadn’t played for two years. He was brilliant for me in the first half with his experience and talking. But he blew up after an hour so he had to go off and that had an effect on us.
"We were chasing the game as well so maybe boys were just getting pulled out of position and we got caught napping. We will have a look back at some of the match footage on the telly to show the boys exactly where they went wrong.
"We have had 12 training sessions with the boys now and two games and this was actually our first bad day.
"So I don’t want to get too down. I want to keep morale high and I want the boys to know that they’re still doing a good job. Penicuik are also a good side and hit us well on the counter attack.
"But at the same time the mistakes weren’t acceptable and the boys know that. I didn’t go through them too much after the match but I let them understand there are expectations that they never matched in the second half.”
Glenrothes, 10th with 32 points from 25 league fixtures, continue their premier division campaign this Saturday in a 2.30pm kick-off at 12th-placed Sauchie Juniors.