James McPake has revealed he is determined to make Dunfermline more creative in attack next season.
And the Pars boss is working on finding the right ways to get the best out of new signing Chris Kane.
The East End Park side were the third-lowest scorers in the Championship last term with just 43 goals.
Only relegated duo Arbroath and Inverness Caley Thistle netted fewer times than the Fifers.
There are obvious areas of recruitment this summer, with a goalkeeper and left-back replacement for Josh Edwards clear priorities.
But McPake has admitted that producing more opportunities for his side’s forwards is uppermost in his planning ahead of the competitive kick-off in the Premier Sports Cup next month.
That includes targeting new attacking options in the transfer market – if the budget allows.
He said: “We know we need to create more chances.
“If you bring in a striker like Chris Kane, and add him to Craig Wighton, Lewis McCann and Taylor Sutherland, you want to give them opportunities.
“We’ve had problems, I think, creating chances. As much as we can say the strikers have missed chances, we’ve not created enough.
McPake: ‘Chances on a plate’
“When we’ve got our full squad, we can be solid, we can be good enough defensively. We’ve shown that.
“We were really hard to break down at times when the team was together.
“But that then becomes a problem when you go up a level into the Championship and you’re facing better teams.
“You’ve got players like Brian Graham coming and playing against you and you know if he gets one chance that nine times out of ten it’s a goal.
“We need to be more like that, we need to put chances on a plate for the strikers.
“We need to work with the strikers so in the tight games those chances are coming our way.
“But we certainly know we need to create more at the top end of the pitch.”
Many supporters have called in previous years for their team to field two strikers up front.
However, McPake is adamant it is not as simple as a change in attacking formation yielding more chances and goals.
He added: “There were loads of games in the season gone where we played two up front. But it’s not so much about that.
McPake: Pars need to ‘work smarter’
“It’s about getting the right players in the right areas of the pitch to open a team up.
“Partick played one up front all season, and – like everybody – would maybe throw someone else on when they were chasing a goal.
“But when you’ve got Aidan Fitzpatrick, Steven Lawless and Scott Robinson, or whoever, creating chances for Brian Graham it’s going to cause problems.
“That’s what we need to do. We need to get players in better areas of the pitch and work smarter when we’re in those areas.
“We know Kane Ritchie-Hosler can create, we know Matty Todd can create and score, but we need to add to that.”
