Airdrie (0) v. Livi (1) 4/11/06

By 201820
November 5 2006

Sandy Stewart's miserably 2006 shows no sign of ending on a high after yet another abject display and result. A last minute sucker punch, or missed punch as it turned out, punished a lack of end product yet again.

I'm not going to bother going into many details of this match, it's pointless I'm just going to be bitter if I do. Missed chances, poor finishing, poor build up play, a goalkeeping error and absolutely no luck bar bad luck pretty much sum up this match. McPhee could have scored early on but skied his effort when clear on goal, Livi had a man sent off for a last man trip on McPhee and Livi snatch a winner at the death as superman ran into an invisible kryptonite wall

I sat there frutstrated as hell, like 1200 odd others, that a team that could and should be doing better has yet again failed to win a winnable match. I don't know the intricacies of football but I do know that what I'm watching is painfully wrong. We didn't seem to have the right balance. Graeme Holmes on the left wing? MacDougall would seem to be the obvious choice there, why trip ourselves up? Why continue again with Prunty on the bench, we need him in the box, he'll never snap his slump smouldering on the bench. Why not change to a more fluid set up when they went to 10 men with McPhee and MacDougall stretching them on the wings?

We're in the same kind of slump we were in back in early 2004. At that time the word coming out of the club is that we didn't seem capable of scoring. It looks exactly the same right now. We're not being thrashed in any games and don't seem to be a million miles away from the same level as most of our peers. We need some subtle changes and we need them quickly.

Back in 2004 he had to change every area of the team but it worked from the first game and grew from there into and unbeaten run. Prior to that change we were trying to fit square pegs into round holes and we had influential players seemingly not performing. One thing we did then was to inject some pace into the side, play through the midfield, and concentrate on attack first. We need to do that again. Putting Holmes into left midfield won't answer any problems for us, Sandy needs to throw everything up in the air again and look at things with a fresh pair of eyes. We have good players and we should be doing better.