Selection headache for manager

Last updated : 26 September 2015 By Fargone

From the Arbroath Herald:  

Todd Lumsden is relishing the prospect of having to make the hard decisions about who to include in his starting 11 every week.

The Arbroath manager says his players are giving him the right kind of problems when it comes to team selection because they’re all doing so well on the park.

Performances were on the up since the capitulation at Montrose but the results just didn’t come for the Lichties.

However they’ve now won their last two on the bounce - with two clean sheets - and Todd says this is just where he wanted his team to be.

Lumsden said: “It was a good performance on Saturday against Stirling, we kept a good clean sheet and scored two good goals. The boys achieved our objective of getting more points on the board so we’re delighted, it was great. We showed our quality in the goals we scored then we restricted them to not much. All around it’s a good performance.

“Winning breeds confidence obviously, but I keep going back to those three games against Queen’s Park, Berwick and Clyde where the confidence was high and the performances were very good.

“The defence kept clean sheets against East Fife and Stirling. The players get the chance and then they have to stake a claim to hold on to a jersey.

“We’ve wanted to be at this stage now where we’re thinking ‘oh what team will we play today’ because when teams are winning it’s harder for players to stake a claim and get a start. That’s what we want, we’ve got a good group and we want a strong squad with players coming off the bench with an impact.

“I think we’ve had that in the last few games and even the boys not in the squad, they need to be working hard in training which they have been.”

Arbroath lost in the Forfarshire Cup Final to Forfar Athletic in mid-week and Todd said while it’ll be hard to change a winning team, the players who played out an exhiliarting tie with the Loons have assured him of his team’s strength in depth.

He added: “It’ll be very difficult to get into the team when they’ve won two games without conceding a goal. But what we know is that if we have to put someone into the team, based on their performance vs Forfar they’re not far short.”