East Fife boss Gary Naysmith focused on the positives after watching his makeshift side compete well with Rangers in the Petrofac Training Cup on Tuesday night.
The Ibrox men ran out comfortable enough 2-0 winners to reach the semi-finals in the end, but Naysmith’s team were far from disgraced as they put on a creditable showing especially when you consider the Bayview boss could muster just 14 players due to injuries.
Naysmith was full of praise for his young squad and hopes they can take great heart from the experience into their League Two campaign.
“What’s happened is that we deliberately went with a smaller squad, 20/21, which is enough because we don’t have a reserve team, we don’t have a youth team,” he explained.
“If you’ve not got a reserve team or a youth team, I don’t know how you could legislate for having a bigger squad.
“But what’s happened is that we’ve just got three or four injuries at the same time, and unfortunately it’s all our left-sided players.
“I’ve got five left-sided players in the team and all of them are injured, so then you get an imbalance in the team because you are having to get a right-sided player to come in.
“It might only happen once or twice more this season, we’ve just got to deal with it and we’re not the only team in the league that it’s going to happen to.
“I’ve said to the players that it’s great because although they are going to play in positions they wouldn’t normally play in, for their football education it’s brilliant.
“If you can come through that it will help you in your career.
“So from a negative for not having players, it’s a positive because you are going to help players who might not have got that chance to get that experience which should help them when we come into big games towards the end of the season i.e. when we’re hopefully playing in games to help us get into the play-offs or pushing for promotion.
“If you can deliver against Rangers you can deliver against anybody in this league.”
East Fife are next in action away to Queen’s Park on Saturday as they aim to get their promotion bid back on track.