Rossvale focus back on promotion after Hurlford heroics

Gordon Moffat’s side gave last season’s runners-up an almighty fright in their fifth round replay, coming back from 4-1 down to within a goal of forcing a penalty shoot out.

The Vale boss admitted: “In the end we had them on the ropes but we just gave ourselves too much to do.

“We’re disappointed with the goals we gave them. If you give a team of that quality a two-goal start you’re going to struggle.

“That said we very nearly pulled it off and got to penalties so I’m chuffed with them over the two games.”

But it wasn’t to be and it’s now back to the Championship promotion race for the Bishopbriggs side.

They travel to Cumbernauld on Saturday for the first of three massive games against other promotion rivals with matches against Arthurlie and Benburb to follow.

Moffat said: “We’re in February but we’re only halfway through. We had a great first half of the season with 10 wins, four draws and a defeat and if we can get something close to that we won’t be far away from going up.”

challengers

Hurlford defeat

“But over the two ties I thought we acquitted ourselves very well.”

Punished for errors

“It’s exactly that.We made four or five errors defensively and got punished for four of them and that’s the jump to the top level teams.

“You’d maybe get away with a couple of them and end up winning the game 3-2 in our league. But when you’re playing the top team in the top league that’s what happens.

Back to league

“It’ll be a tough one. We’ve not got three massive games against teams that are going for promotion with us so we’ll need to quickly regroup and get our head back into the league, which the boys will.

“We know we have some tough games ahead. Cumbernauld are a good side and the first game at our place was a very tight game that ended up 1-1. They were miles better fiorst half, we were miles better second half, so it will be interesting.”

Consistency

“It’s just going to be a case of trying to string resuylts topgether, pretty much the same as last season. The difference this season is there’s no massive expectation on us to go up, being a promoted team, but for me I still want to give it the best we can.

“We just take a game at a time or we maybe look at blocks of maybe three games at a time, target ghow many points we can get and see where it gets us.”