Broxburn Athletic warned to avoid slip-ups in East of Scotland Premier Division title race with Bo'ness United

Albyn Park side have games in hand on the BUs

Broxburn Athletic are hopeful of making ground on league leaders Bo'ness

Broxburn Athletic assistant boss Stevie Hislop admits his side can’t afford any slip-ups if they wish to catch Premier Division league leaders Bo’ness United in the race for the title.

The Albyn Park men are nine points adrift of their rivals but have two games in hand and will look to cut the gap when they visit Penicuik Athletic tomorrow, who are incidentally the last club to beat them back in early December, Broxburn have since gone on an eight-game unbeaten run.

Hislop reckons that defeat, and the way Penicuik celebrated in the aftermath of the victory, was the catalyst for their recent purple patch.

“The way they celebrated at the end of the game... I don’t know if it was because they were going on their Christmas night out to Newcastle and they thought that was a defining point in their season, but I said to the players to use it as a catalyst to bounce back," he said.

“Their celebrations were really exuberant and absolutely, fair play - celebrate if you win a game.

“That was our last defeat, and it wasn’t a nice defeat because we didn’t play well and Penicuik probably deserved to win that day. The boys were down and Penicuik were extremely happy after the game, so I said, ‘Use that as your motivation.’ There is no better feeling than winning games and we’ve done that, we’ve gone to places like Tranent and won.”

Hislop says his players can only focus on their own fixtures, as they aim to make ground on Max Christie's side. Broxburn came up just short in last season’s race as they suffered a 3-2 comeback defeat to Bonnyrigg Rose who secured promotion to the Lowland League as a result.

They don’t want to be nearly men again, as he continued: “We’ve got eleven games to go, there is a long, long way to go but Bo’ness have the points in the bag and it is theirs to lose.

“We are going to need a favour to win the league, but we can’t afford to worry about anybody else, we will just go about our own business. If it is enough come the end of the season, brilliant, if not, then as long as there are no regrets then at least we can’t say, ‘Aw, we should’ve done better.’

“I made a comment to my players, which I'll keep confidential, about how many games we would have to win to win the league. You can’t really afford to start losing games early on in our target. If we win our games in hand, which is a big if, then we will go three points behind them.

“We will 100 per cent drop points before the end of the season, and that’s not a lack of confidence in the players, that is because there are good teams we still have to play. There will be injuries, suspensions and a lot of midweek games, so we will drop points, but we need to drop as few as possible.”