Berwick Rangers hoping for winning double v Cowdenbeath
Berwick Rangers head north to Fife to take on Cowdenbeath this coming Saturday looking for a second win on the bounce against old fourth-tier rivals after getting the better of Albion Rovers by 3-1 on home turf at the weekend.
Rangers made amends for a 4-1 loss to Rovers in October’s reverse fixture in North Lanarkshire at Shielfield Park on Saturday and they’re now hoping to notch up their first back-to-back victories of this Scottish Lowland Football League season by pulling off a winning double against the Fifers, having beaten them 2-0 at home in their opening game of this campaign back in July.
Theo McCormick put the Coatbridge crew ahead on Saturday on 27 minutes but manager Kevin Haynes’ hosts, given a helping hand by a 50th-minute red card for Martin McArthur for a foul on Caelan McCrone, hit back with goals from Greg Binnie on 40 minutes, Danny Handling on 48 and Jamie Pyper on 72 to claim their tenth three-point haul of this term.
Haynes, 44, felt his side got off to a slow start but was pleased by the way they fought back after falling behind, telling the club’s Facebook page: “I thought we started slow, probably more to do with the formation and change of shape, and we kind of got overrun in the middle of the pitch, I felt.
“We didn’t pick up as many second balls and we didn’t play to the strengths of the guys I had in there, but once we changed shape after 25 minutes, we got ourselves right back into the game.
“It was a good goal from Binnie and I felt from there we just controlled the game pretty much.
“I felt Albion Rovers didn’t defend crosses very well, so that’s why we went with two up front.
“I wanted to get two strikers in the box and I wanted to flood the box with crosses, but it didn’t happen. We got two or three crosses in the first half but we didn’t get enough and that was allowing Rovers to have the man overload in the middle of the pitch.
“We weren’t getting the benefit from it, so we reverted back and I felt we controlled the game from there.”
Looking ahead to playing Cowdenbeath, he added: “We’ve discussed the rivalry between the two clubs before and it has very much of a derby feeling.
“We need to go and impose ourselves on the game.
“We won the reverse fixture here and it’s been pointed out in the stats that we’ve totally flipped reverse fixtures – games we won in the first half of the season we’ve lost and we’re winning games that we had lost, so we need to make sure that we don’t lose that one and that will set us up for our next midweek game against Civil Service Strollers.”
Rangers are now up to 11th in the table, on 34 points from 25 fixtures, one place and three points worse off than this weekend’s hosts but with a game in hand on them.