Mark’s message is here until January

TBH - “I thought I’d take the chance to thank the club from my own Twitter account

A thank you tweet a week past Saturday night by Mark Connolly concerned the Dunfermline fans amongst his 7300 followers on Twitter but the Irishman on loan from Dundee United has given re-assurances that there are no plans for his loan period to be cut short.

His tweet:- “Thank you @officialdafc for allowing me to come on loan! With recent developments this club is 100% on the up! Hard work will get it to where everyone believes it should be! Don’t stop supporting and keep believing.”

The central defender who made his Dunfermline debut against Raith Rovers on 29th September, explained his Twitter post which gave fans a fright:-

“It was because I don’t go on Twitter much and I thought I’d take the chance to thank the club from my own Twitter account to say thank you very much for allowing me to come. I’m still here until January, you never know we will see what happens.”

He pledged his allegiance to Dunfermline Athletic and would not be averse to making his move permanent should United decide they could release him:-

“It is something that I’m open to. I will take it a step at a time. If Dunfermline want to keep me and my options at Dundee United are not open there, I would definitely consider it. I have really enjoyed it, I have really enjoyed working with the manager. They are a great group of boys. I’m just desperate from now to 16th January to try and get results.”

Unfortunately Saturday’s match against Hamilton Academical at the Fountain of Youth Stadium was not one that produced the kind of result that Mark is looking for. He believed that Dunfermline were really up against it after Graham Dorrans was shown a red card with thirty minutes remaining and the Accies were able to score from the resultant penalty kick:-

“I think we started well for the first fifteen minutes but we passed the ball with not enough threat. They grew into the game and they were on the front foot. I don’t think they really created any chances - you are not looking back at it thinking Fonners made an unbelievable save here or there.

“It was just one of those ones, it ended up being a penalty, you were down to ten men and you are trying to hold on to try and hopefully scramble something near the end. It was very frustrating, very very frustrating when you compare with the Ayr game when we played well.

“As the manager said, and I know myself with experience, sometimes it means that you are going to have to win horrible, roll your sleeves up, be hard to beat and nick a goal at the end but unfortunately we just couldn’t do that.”

Mark confirmed that the entire team were frustrated given video footage did not appear to support the match officials decisions:-

“There were a lot of bodies around, I think the referee was quite far away, I was right beside Graham and it looked like he made that action but it hit him on the chest.

“It is just that little bit of luck, that doesn’t happen. You’d probably come away with 0-0 thinking that we didn’t play as great as what we should do but we’d take the point and get up the road. Unfortunately we just didn’t get that rub of the green.

“In my opinion I didn’t feel that it was a penalty but we have to dust ourselves down and get ready for a big game next Saturday.”

Mark is keen to experience the feeling and lift again after the Pars won the Inverness and Ayr games:-

“It is very very difficult when you are not winning games of football. It’s very hard and I’m one of those people if I’m finding it difficult to deal with it I go home on a Saturday and over think it and don’t really talk much about it to my missus. I just want to win football matches and get results for this club while I’m here and hopefully, until January at least I can help do that.”

The next opportunity to get three points on the board comes next weekend when Queen of the South are the visitors to East End Park and Mark says that it is a case of battling for a win:-

“The manager has come in and he has changed the mindset and he has brought a big lift to the boys and to the club. The fans have properly bought into what he is bringing and what he is doing. We can’t let that fall after a defeat on Saturday, we have to make sure that we go again. Nothing changes, work hard, roll our sleeves up and just keep going.

“We can’t feel sorry for ourselves, we can’t point fingers at this and that. We have to keep grinding, keep trying to get results. That is football that’s the way it goes.”

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