Performance pain for Paton and Pars
Sunday, 24th Nov 2019“I cannot put my finger on it as to why because the attitude was good, but certainly that was dreadful.”
As captain Paul Paton was selected to speak to the website and relate the feelings of the dressing room in the aftermath of the Scottish Cup knock out at Stranraer on Saturday. He was honest in his appraisal:-
“You have to hold your hands up and say that we were a mile off it today. It is not as if we have come into the game with the wrong attitude, we had a good attitude all week in training. We knew what is was going to be today, it was going to be a battle.
“They have some decent players but to a man we were really poor. We have let ourselves down, the fans down and the management team down.
“They have worked us hard all week, they have drilled into us what a hard game it is going to be. For us to turn in that performance for them and the travelling fans we are obviously absolutely gutted.”
There was no denying that Stranraer were more up for the cup tie than Dunfermline, Paul continued:-
“I hadn’t sensed that all week, I sensed that we were bang up for it. We trained hard, we came here in good spirit expecting to go out and put a good show on or at least battle hard but we never did any of that.”
In the early stages Pars keeper Ryan Scully was by far the busier of the two keeper and his saves kept the Stair Park club out prior to his 14th minute injury.
“We were lucky still to be 0-0 as long as it was, they hit the post but I’m not going to make any excuses - we were absolutely terrible today.”
Paul said that the feeling at half time was that it couldn’t be any worse but he suggested that in the second half possibly they were:-
“I don’t know if maybe we were. Again as bad as we were it was just another mistake, another penalty that we have given away. We have given away so many penalties this year and made so many mistakes for goals, just individual errors.
“As a captain, was I good enough? Absolutely not, so I hold my hands up as well but it is just individual errors that are killing us. It is time that we grow up and we take the stick for making these mistakes. We need to learn from it and very quick.”
Having won there in the Scottish Cup with Dundee United in February 2015, the Pars skipper was not without experience of previous trips to Stranraer but admitted the Third Round knock out as “one of my worst cup defeats”:-
“It is obviously not nice but I do not want to be disrespectful to Stranraer. I thought they deserved it. For some reason it felt as though they wanted it more than us and that is unacceptable at a club like Dunfermline.
“It would be wrong of me to say it was all about us, Stranraer were the better side and they deserved to win. It is as Dunfermline captain that I am saying that and I don’t find that acceptable.
“I cannot put my finger on it as to why because the attitude was good, but certainly that was dreadful.”
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