
#009 - Winter transfers and their performances
03/02/2020 -- The first half of the season has come to an end, so is the winter transfer window. As already said a couple of updates ago we finally have our new goalkeeper at Ainslie Park. A really good upgrade in comparison with Carswell, hopefully he is more capable catching shots from distance… If you take a look at the profiles between those two Adam definitely is the better goalkeeper. Probably Adam is directly send into the squad because of Carswell made some dubious decisions again in the match against Forres Mechanics, in what was believed his last opportunity extending his role as a starting player. Otherwise Carswell has been maintain in the squad until he made one fatal mistake again, but right now it seems all over for him. Underneath I’ve shown the profile of Adam and the comparison with Carswell.

But there's more. Firstly we lost two guys who are loaned to us. For one of them we won’t extend his loan contract till the end of the season because our expectations are far ahead in comparison with his actual achievements. So right-winger Leeroy Makovora is returning to our Premiership affiliated club Hearts. The Zimbabwean played 20 matches, scoring only two goals. The other guy is no longer available for us for hiring. Jake Davidson returned to Dundee United and his club declined our offer extending his loan contract until the end of the season. A bit disappointingly though, because the last two months he became a starting player and performed quite well.
But we are probably saved by our great scouting staff. Somewhere around the Christmas days they found Mark Finlayson. A free agent who left Falkirk a year ago and played for an amateur team somewhere in the outskirts of Livingston, a city near Edinburgh. We offered him a 7 days internship, played a friendly match with our second squad and he made a good impression. So we decide to offer him a contract, which he signed. At least he is as good as Davidson was, but to be honest I think he is more than that. Another big plus is that he can play as a full-back as well.

That’s not all yet. We definitely have to replace Makovora because McFarland is not performing that great as a backup. We tried to loan somebody in, but we already hired the maximum of four players this season, despite two of them already left us. So I made the decision to move youngster Bill Swanson into the first team. He performed quite good in our under-18 team and the scouts do believe he has some great potential. We shall see if he can replace McFarland. I also shifted left-back Gregor McFarlane and central midfielder Robbie Banks into the first team, mainly because of current left-back Graham Doig performs really bad and Banks is believed to be a good player for the nearby future. Furthermore we get rid of some players who can’t count on to many playtime at the moment and dumped some talents who probably never going to reach into the first squad. For some of them we managed to get a resale fee of 50 percent, so maybe we can earn some little money from them in the future.

Our performances with the new guys
The big question of course is how we performed with our newbies. After a win and a loss just before the end of the year we started against Bonnyrigg Rose. They are a few points above us in the league, so three points are welcome. But we started really, really bad. After only ten minutes we conceded two goals from set-pieces (which is by far our biggest weakness, most of the goals we conceding so far this season are from set-pieces actually) and a big loss lies ahead. But we scraped ourselves together and in the second half our 16-year old striker Bryan Griffiths forced to score a goal twice, saving a point for us. Thereafter we loss a bit unluckily against the bottom team in the League, but win our following away game against Cumbernauld.
The start of February will be very though. We are facing the best three teams in the league in a row, starting with a home game against leader Brora Rangers. Away we played a draw, but today they were simply too good for us. We had some chances to score a late equalizer, but that hadn’t been a fair result to be honest. So, in summary, we performing not that good at the moment and really need to pick up some form soon if we want to fight for a place in the play-offs. A couple of wins can bring us back in the top six again, but at the other hand a few losses can be devastating given the fact all midtable teams are quite close to each other right now. Underneath I've showned the results this far and the league table (which is from before the match against Brora actually, I forgot taking a picture after the 29th playing round).

