Ian Murray admits Raith Rovers are struggling to piece together the perfect preparations for their promotion play-offs – because everyone else is either on holiday or too busy.
Ideally, the Stark’s Park outfit would play a bounce game for this week, given they are idle awaiting their semi-final opponents.
Whilst Airdrie and Partick Thistle battle it out to progress, Raith will have had 11 days without action by the time they face the winners next Tuesday.
With the Rovers players getting some time off in the wake of Friday’s 5-0 hammering of Arbroath, Murray is determined to piece together the best build-up in the circumstances.
A friendly is unlikely to be part of that, however, with teams either involved in the play-offs or finished for the summer, and Premiership sides finishing the campaign with three games in a week.
“We have made enquiries with a few teams about a bounce game,” Murray explained. “But it’s so difficult.
“Nobody really wants to play at this stage of the season.
“That makes life hard for us.
“If not, we’ll maybe do something in-house, depending on our numbers.
‘Prepare as best we can’
“If we can’t do that, we’ll just have to go and prepare as best we can for whoever we’re playing in the play-off games.
“At the moment, we couldn’t take on a game anyway due to the numbers coming back into training [from injury].
“Then, when we get them back, we want to keep them back.
“We have tried [to get a bounce game] but nobody wants to play at this stage in the season, when everyone is kind of finishing.
“And the others are all going into the play-offs straight away. So it’s very, very difficult.”
He added: “Because it’s 11 days in between, it’s not too bad.
“We had the game on Friday and our player-of-the-year awards on Sunday .
“Before you know it we’re back into that seven-day cycle again from Tuesday to Tuesday.
“It would maybe have been more difficult if it had been 14 days or longer.
Reset
“But we’re quite glad to get a wee break as well. It gives us time to get over a few of the bumps and bruises.
“We’ve not got anything serious, but it’s probably good for us to just have a wee reset and let the boys get back.”
Meanwhile, Murray will ‘spy’ on Airdrie and Partick Thistle in their play-off quarter-final first-leg on Tuesday night – and again on Friday night in the decider.
In fact, staff from Raith will attend as many matches as they can in the coming days, right across the divisions.
“We’ll go to the games, I think we have to,” Murray added.
“We’ll now take in as many games as we can, in all the play-off games – right from the Lowland League to the Premiership.
“We’re going to cover all bases.
“But certainly we’ll be watching Airdrie-Partick.”
