Celtic clash gives Albion Rovers chance to land first B team success

Albion Rovers boss Sandy Clark hopes to clock up a first B team win this season as Celtic visit Cliftonhill in the Lowland League on Saturday.

Clark reckons his side deserved more than a 2-1 defeat against Hearts B in Edinburgh on Friday night, and hopes they go one step further against the Glasgow giants’ reserves.

The Rovers gaffer says his side played well at Ainslie Park, with captain Niyah Joseph levelling with a second-half penalty, but mistakes at crucial times cost them dearly.

Clark said: “We haven’t managed to take anything from the B teams – Hearts have beat us twice and Celtic beat us the last time, and in all three games so far we should have taken something.

“Hopefully we can change that on Saturday.

“I didn’t think we deserved to lose on Friday, but the other side of that is I know exactly why we lost that game, we were really poor at both goals.

“To go behind in two minutes gave Hearts a lift, they’re a good team with a lot of really good young players, and they and Celtic B present a different challenge to the rest of the teams in the Lowland League.

“To be fair we worked really hard to get back in the game, got back in, deservedly so, and then lost an absolutely incredibly bad goal, with really poor defending from us.

“It wasn’t just one player, it was four different players who had a chance to stop it happening, and that’s something that we’ve been really good at, recently.

“I’ve been trying to say to the guys that the team that makes the least mistakes wins the game,

and those two poor goals cost us the match.

“That was the disappointing thing – the actual performance merited to get something out of it, but in reality we lost the game because of our mistakes.

“I’ve watched Celtic’s B team a few times