Hawick Royal Albert up for cup against premier division opposition

The East of Scotland Football League second division side host West Lothian’s Blackburn United on Saturday, with kick-off at Albert Park at 2.30pm.

United are currently 13th in the EoSFL premier division, having been beaten 3-1 at home by Fife’s Dundonald Bluebell at the weekend, with two points from four games.

That’s 37 places better off in the league’s standings than Albert, currently bottom of their 18-team table without any points from their four games so far following a 4-0 home loss to Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University at the weekend, so manager Kenny Aitchison isn’t expecting an easy afternoon.

“I think a lot of teams will find it hard to travel down to Hawick, but we know Blackburn are a very, very good team,” he said.

“I would say they’re not far off Heriot-Watt, and in a lot of ways, they’re slightly better than them.

“We have a rough idea of what we’re up against.

“I’ve already picked my team and I won’t be making many changes for the game this weekend.

“If we can put in the same sort of performance as we did against Heriot-Watt, there is a big chance that we could get something from that tie.”

Looking back at Saturday’s defeat, Aitchison said: “I was actually pretty happy with our performance, strange to say.

“Heriot-Watt are a really good team, so I would say that result was expected, but our performance and what we’d worked on were certainly an improvement on the previous weekend and that’s what we’ll take from it to build on.

“They were obviously fitter than us, but we had a fantastic first half and restricted them to one shot, which was their goal, and on reviewing the footage I could see, as I thought at the time, that their striker was three yards offside.

“I would say our game-plan worked to a tee. They had no chances. They had a bit of possession but they couldn’t get the ball into dangerous areas, and we had a few counter-attacks of our own that could have resulted in a goal.

“I was very pleased with how it went. We worked a basic 4-4-2 and we made sure there wasn’t a big enough gap between our three lines for them to get through, and that made it very tough for them.”

On the scoresheet for the student side, managed by Banji Koya, were Nandom Domyil, Alex McCreadie, Ali Shrive and Ross McLaren.