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Daily Record
Daily Record
Sport
Stuart Gillespie

St Cuthbert Wanderers thrash Upper Annandale to move closer to South of Scotland League title

St Cuthbert Wanderers edged closer to the South of Scotland League title with a comfortable win over Upper Annandale on Saturday.

Scott Ballantyne scored twice and skipper Ross Hunter was also on target with Dale Milligan coming off the bench to score in the 4-0 win.

The win keeps Saints nine points clear of Threave Rovers at the top of the table with just five games to go.

Williamson said: “We know we’re going to score, we set up in a way to have as many options as possible in the final third and the best possible chance to score.

“If it comes from the midfielders or forwards it doesn’t matter, its good to see it coming but all of the front three being on the scoresheet just tops it off.

“We spoke before about getting into good habits towards the business end of the season, picking up clean sheets and being defensively solid and we did that on Saturday.

“We scored early and perhaps that was more of a hindrance than a help. I felt the players tried to force things a bit too much, we were trying to be very direct and it almost played into the opposition’s hands.

“At half-time we said we wanted to get the ball back on the ground and dictate the game from our point of view.

“The reaction was good, we’ve got more opportunities towards goal and you’ve seen the difference in terms of the score.”

It’s a return to cup action for Saints this weekend as they head to Abbey Vale in the Haig Gordon Cup.

The game was played at the start of February but had to be abandoned due to conditions leaving the Maryfield Park pitch unplayable.

Williamson said: “We know it’ll be tough and they have home advantage but we can take the experience of that first 45 minutes and being 1-0 up before it was abandoned.

“We’ve played them twice before and had two wins.

“One was a difficult game to turn around as we fell behind twice. We know they have quality and we were a little bit off that day but we still managed to grind it out so we know we’ve got that in our locker.

“We also played them in a cup and we won 6-0 at home so we know if we do things right and try to dictate the game we’ve got the quality to get a good result against them.”

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