Peterhead manager Jim McInally has admitted that he had to go down the unusual route of having stern words with his players at half-time in Saturday’s game at Falkirk as he felt that the match was passing them by.
The Bairns led 2-0 at the break and Jim had grown frustrated with what he had seen and whilst the words worked, and the Blue Toon had a much better second half, they still slipped to a 2-1 defeat.
Jim said: “We had the league leaders panicking at the end but that does not disguise the fact that in the first half we were miles off. Gary MacKenzie should have done better with the chance he had and then their two goals came from mistakes that we made. We were making what was always going to be a hard game even harder.”
“I had strong words at half-time and I told the players to start taking part in the game. That is not an approach I have to take very often as they are a good group but it was the same against Forfar last weekend and we need to start games correctly.”
“To be fair to the players they took it on board and gave as good as we got, if not being better than Falkirk, in the second. It was a ‘Night and Day’ performance and if Alan Cook had scored the chance he had early on we would have had a good bit of time to push for an equaliser.”
“Lyall Cameron did pull a goal back with just over 10 minutes left and then had a chance not long afterwards when Steven Boyd played him in. We pushed Jason Brown up into the attack and that did leave us open to the threat of counter-attack however Falkirk were time-wasting to get over the line.”
“That second half performance is the standard we should be hitting and it is frustrating that the game had to be the way it was. I am not happy at losing however we showed what we can do for 45 minutes at a tough venue, minus Simon Ferry, Isaac Layne and Ben Armour, but we need to show what we can do for 90 minutes.”
