July 15th 2024
RONNIE Sharp is planning to shake-up his Nairn County team for the final five games of the season after they succumbed to a second successive 4-1 away defeat and sixth defeat in their last eight matches in total. Hosts Rothes were one up within a minute through Jaime Wilson and never really looked back. Gary Kerr doubled the lead before Jordan MacRae gave County hope with a strike before the interval. That was the spark for Nairn to dominate the second half until Wilson headed in his second of the game against the run of play on the hour-mark. Dale Wood then blasted home to settle it for Rothes midway through the second 45. County now sit eight goals behind their total league total for last season with just five matches remaining and that is a fact not lost on Sharp. “We have a problem up front,” he said. “Scoring goals has been our Achilles heel and you can see that by the number of goals we have scored, which is only 49 in the league all season. We are getting into good positions but we just do not seem to be able to turn that into goals and that is putting an awful lot of pressure on the defence." “We are giving away some silly goals which are happening a lot when we are on the attack. But it has been going on all season and we now have five games to go where we are going to have to make some drastic changes. We are going to have to see what other boys can do and what players can do in different positions because at the moment, we are going stale.” Wilson’s opener came with approximately 20 seconds on the clock as Rothes swarmed all over County and cut through the middle of the visiting defence. “It was poor defending from us right from the off,” stated Sharp. “It went down there left and Daniel (Hoban) made two great blocks but we have to be sharper. We had a couple of chances to clear it but we were not sharp enough. That happened with most of the goals and we really are struggling in the first 10 or 15 minutes of games. After that, I thought we matched them for the rest of the first half. But we had that problem earlier in the season and I thought we were over it but maybe it is the personnel and we might need to change things.” MacRae pulled a goal back and County fashioned a number of chances at the start of the second half with Ewen Urquhart heading against the ball and Dylan Mackenzie and Tom Maclennan both firing off target. Sharp said: “We had the chances to get level at 2-2 and we would have had the momentum if we had managed to do that. But we gave away another silly goal – the ball was out wide and we did not work hard enough to close down the cross. The move all start from us being on the attack before it was played into the corner. We did not block the boy and he was able to turn and put another cross into the box." “The fourth one was a great strike but it originally came off poor play from ourselves. We gave away a needless free kick as we were tackling from the wrong side and we have been doing that for the last few weeks. We seem to give away a lot of cheap and needless free kicks and with the quality Daniel Moore and Dale Gillespie have, you cannot do that – their balls into the box were causing all sorts of problems." “But you cannot look to defend for 90 minutes in a game – you have to do better going forward.” Graeme Macleod
