No need for nonsense

Andy Dowie - "I try to help when I can but the boys have done that well ...

Andy Dowie felt that Saturday was a great day for Dunfermline as they leapfrogged Partick and Morton to retake the top spot:-

"The teams up there challenging were faced with tricky games but we were just concentrating on our own. We knew that it was going to be difficult because Dumbarton had picked up two great results and are a much harder team to play against now than the one we played earlier in the season.

"We were disappointed with how we played, we never really passed the ball as well as we could. The conditions played a part in that but we should still have played better but it is all about getting the three points."

Two clean sheets in the last two matches are a boost to the defence who Andy revealed were disappointed with the way they had played in recent games:-

"Hopefully we can kick on from this and go on a run. I think at this moment in time that it is fair to say that it (the championship) is going to be out of the three us (Dunfermline, Partick and Morton) and it is probably going to go straight to the wire."

Dunfermline went back on top after Morton lasted only seven days in pole position and Partick Thistle and Dunfermline have already rotated the top two positions earlier in the season. Andy knows that things change and is only really focussed on league positions in May:-

"We are not that fussed about the top of the league at the moment but come the end of the season that's where we want to be. It looks as though it is going to be really tight."

The mood off the pitch is obviously going to be important in the next five months and Andy said that it had improved from a particular low:-

"The mood now is fine, I would be lying if I said that it was fine a few weeks ago. It was affecting some of the boys slightly but that is no excuse for the bad results. Now everything is cleared up we are all fine and the boys are back to their usual."

Andy was a member of Dunfermline's First Division championship winning side in 2011 but he knows that there will be no possibility of January signings like two years ago when Kevin Rutkiewicz, Martin Hardie and Liam Buchanan arrived to give a boost to the promotion push.

"We did win the league with bags of experience - boys who had won the league before and this time around we don't have that experience but there is a hunger and a desire there. The boys that the Manager has brought in have been outstanding, every one of them. We just hope to kick on from this."

Along with Joe Cardle and Andy Kirk, Andy Dowie is the sole members of that championship winning team still at East End Park. New team mate Shaun Byrne was at the Club as a 17 year old starring in Hamish French's U19 team and Andy is not surprised that the latest product of the Pars Youth Programme has made an impact in the matches he has played against Raith Rovers and Dumbarton:-

"Shaun will probably feel that he could have been in the team earlier because at training sessions he was always one of the best players in training. When the Manager came in he caught the Manager's eye straight away but he has waited patiently and done well even though these kind of conditions are not suited to his play, He dug in and showed the other side of his game."

Guys like Andy Dowie who will be 30 in March, will have a responsibility to bring on the young side and use his experience of First Division football to lift them out of it:-

"I try to help when I can but the boys have done that well sometimes they don't need the nonsense I talk!"