East Fife at home in season finale
[Monday, 03 May 2021 17:58]
The ‘curtain’ will come down on a truncated 2020/21 season for Forfar Athletic when East Fife are the visitors to Station Park on Tuesday evening in what is the 22nd and final league fixture of the season.
The opportunity to look back on a season which will be remembered, in fact never forgotten for a host of wrong reasons will be taken later in the week. However, it is a season that has seen the ‘Loons’ struggle throughout and despite two victories in three days at the end of last week, relegation to the SPFL League 2 was confirmed when Clyde defeated Dumbarton on Saturday past.
Those wins for the Athies over Clyde and Peterhead emphasised, without doubt, the improvement in the overall performance level of the squad over the past few weeks under the stewardship of Gary Irvine and Tony Docherty and the interim management team will no doubt be hoping that a third three-point haul can be gleaned from the visit of Darren Young’s side.
There were a few minor knocks come the end of the ninety minutes at Balmoor on Saturday past, Grant Anderson’s looking the most serious and all will be assessed prior to kick-off.
For the Station Park squad it will be their 14th competitive game over a 45 day period since the re-start, but to be fair we are not the only team in that ‘boat’ and at the end of the day no one was under any illusion as to what we were signing up for in early March.
It is in fact great credit to all the twenty clubs, especially the coaching staff and players of those clubs that the remaining re-arranged league games and the post spilt fixtures have been completed, with the play-off fixtures scheduled to start only four days behind the originally scheduled dates.
Back to Tuesday night’s game. The visitors defeated Dumbarton in their first post-split game, before the fiasco which saw their clash with Clyde fail to take place last Tuesday. They then slumped to 3-1 home defeat to Peterhead on Thursday evening of last week.
With their Broadwood visit re-scheduled for this Thursday, they will be keen to consolidate and maintain the sixth place position that they occupied at the end of the 18 games original campaign.
Ross Meechan and his colleagues though will be all out to end a disappointing season on a high and despite the Fifers having triumphed 2-1 in the snow at the same venue just three weeks back, there is no reason why that third successive victory for the ‘Loons’ cannot be achieved.
Barry Cook who refereed our away fixture at Airdrie last month is again the man in charge on Tuesday.
The kick-off is again at the earlier time of 7 p.m.