Willie Harvey says Rutherglen Glencairn suffered at the hands of a “very officious” referee in their 1-0 friendly defeat at Hurlford on Saturday.
Drew Wingate was shown a straight red card just before the interval, and while Harvey concedes it would have been merited in a full game, he says the whistler could have shown leniency.
Instead, Harvey reckons he spoiled what had been a good game up until that point.
He said: “The performance was absolutely superb, fitness levels were great.
“The disappointing thing was that the referee spoiled the game a wee bit – he was very, very officious.
“Friendlies tend to be a wee bit more relaxed and you can let things go that you wouldn’t normally.
“So the sending off... probably by the letter of the law it was a sending off, but any other given time in a game like that, the referee would come to the side and say ‘really I should be sending him off, so I want you to take him off and replace him’.
“It kind of spoiled the game for us, because I felt at that point we were quite in control of the game and we really weren’t struggling.
“We didn’t really let any chances in behind us or anything like that.
“So to have a full second half to play with 10 men was quite annoying, especially considering we had five 21-year-olds with us.
“There was no malice, there had been no problems in the game, nobody had been having digs at each other, it had actually been a really good game, so it was disappointing.”
Glencairn host Petershill tonight at the Hamish B Allan Stadium before heading to Bo’ness Athletic for their final friendly before the West of Scotland League kicks off.
Harvey admits he will be looking to further strengthen his squad and intends to run the rule over some players, but is keeping his cards close to his chest.
He said: “We’ve got a couple of players coming out on trial tonight but I’m not mentioning names, because I don’t want people turning up looking to maybe snatch them from under our noses.
“But we’re still trying to add to the squad a wee bit.
“We still maybe need a defender and we need to add to the striking department, but I’m hopeful that we’ll have done that before the start of the season, and if I do that I’ll be quite confident.
“Saturday gave us that boost, because Hurlford are going to be one of the better teams in the league and I thought we did really well.”
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