East Fife manager Willie Aitchison hopes his players’ efforts this week will translate into a much better performance than the one they gave at Bayview last weekend.
The Fifers boss was not only disappointed with his side’s result at home to Forfar but the manner of their 3-1 defeat, particularly the cheap goals they conceded after an impressive week’s work on the training field.
Aitchison will now have to pick his team up ahead of a tricky trip to bottom club Stranraer, and he is looking for an improvement on Saturday’s showing.
“We just didn’t play at all,” he said.
“We did wee things in spits and spats but the basics were all over the place. That was the really disappointing thing because the players had been doing all the right things in training all week.
“We had a game plan and the plan was working on the pitch, but the basics the basic defending, basic hard work let us down. I’m quite angry but frustrated in the sense that we should have done better in the game.”
The Fifers played top scorer Liam Buchanan off the front two on Saturday, and it was a ploy that sadly did not work.
“We wanted to try and open them up with the passing but we just never got going with the passing,” Aitchison explained.
“We worked on a lot of things at training about trying to get into the second third of the pitch very quickly and working from there but we just didn’t do it.
“The game plan was to get higher up the park and play forward rather than across and get Cedric (Tuta), Liam (Buchanan) and Fash (Nathan Austin) involved.”