North junior football side Forres Thistle win first game in six months to give new management team a victorious start
Forres Thistle celebrated a new managerial appointment with their first north junior football victory in six months.
The Logie Park outfit, so often challengers in their division in recent season, have endured a tough campaign and find themselves just five points off the bottom of the league.
But after recruiting ex-Auldearn FC management team Barrie Macdonald and Derek Theman as co-bosses last week, it sparked an immediate response from the team.
In their first game, the new men in charge led Forres to an Elginshire Cup victory over Hall Russell United, a team who thumped them 5-0 in a Championship fixture only a week earlier.
Co-manager Theman hailed the efforts of his new team and outlined future plans to attract the best of footballing talent in the area to the club to bring vast improvement in their fortunes.
“It was a great feeling,” he said after Saturday’s 1-0 victory at Logie Park. “It was a bit of a party atmosphere, to be fair, because it's been a long six months for them.
“I don't even think they've kept a clean sheet in six months.”
Thistle started the season bossed by Jamie McGowan, who had been at the helm for 18 months.
But a 7-0 victory over Whitehills in mid-September proved to be Jags’ last win of the year, signalling McGowan’s departure in January. The club advertised the vacancy and long-serving player Craig Robertson managed the team for their past three games, with the winless run extending into a sixth month.
Macdonald and Theman, both stalwarts of the Forres and Nairn welfare league who most recently managed Auldearn, saw the vacancy as an opportunity.
“There's no way that I could say no, especially since I'm a Forres boy,” Theman said.
“We'd seen an advert on Facebook, and just registered an interest, but deep down we thought, they're bound to have a lot of applicants, so we didn't really think that we'd have a chance.
“We kept in touch with (club chairman) Steve Johnston and eventually we got called in front of the committee. In between that, four or five weeks between first meeting Steve and going in front of the committee, we'd done a lot of our own work in the background, just in case.
“We put the feelers out, we spoke to a few players to see if they'd come in, but we didn't want to say too much, because there was a manager in place, so we had to respect that, and we didn't want it getting out that they were speaking to us.
“We got offered the job on the Monday night, and obviously we were buzzing, we took it straight away. It just a whirlwind week, from Monday to Saturday, really the phones were non-stop for the whole week. It was like a full-time job for the first week.
“So it's been unbelievable. I'm still in dreamland after getting the win in our first game - it’s been just great.”
Forres ended their long wait for a win when Josh Stephenson scored the only goal against Aberdeen visitors Hall Russell, netting the rebound after his first half penalty had been saved.
A battling effort secured the cup success and Theman said it came down to the players’ determination rather than any major overhaul of the team’s approach under their new bosses.
“I think what the difference probably was is that I'm quite a passionate person, and maybe the players saw that I was passionate, and that was it. There was no tactical genius or anything about it, it was just passion.
“The team talk was pretty much just to do this for Stevie Johnston, the chairman and the committee who have been through to hell for the last six, seven months. IOt was a case of ‘let's get a smile back on their faces’.
“I'm glad we did it but we need to kick on. We can't just keep saying we've won one game against Hall Russell.”
Macdonald and Theman have also taken former Thistle assistant manager Keith Simpson back to the club as first team coach. Current player, former Highland League striker Ricky Wardrop will also help out on the coaching side.
Theman outlined their targets for Thistle over the remainder of the season and the plans to develop the club in the future.
“The short term aim is really to just try and get a bounce back, get the players to understand that they are better than where they are in the league.
“We saw that in Saturday’s game so it’s a case of just to keep fighting like that for the rest of the season.
“I mean, that's us through in the cup, and I'm pretty certain the majority of people would have had us beaten, after they beat us 5-0 the week before.
“I'm not going to set silly targets for the league, because we are where we are, but just get a couple of wins and push ourselves up the table. The cups are one-off games so who knows what we can do there.
“When it comes to pre-season, we'll try and bring in some fresh faces, a bit more experience in the squad, and see where we can go from there.
“We've spoke to a lot of players all week, ex-Forres Thistle players and that, and we've had a really, really good feedback from them.
“Maybe the feel-good factor is coming back and we can maybe get some of the experienced players back as well.
“Everything that we're going to do now is going to be trying to make it fun. Training is going to be fun.
“Obviously, the 90 minutes on a Saturday is serious, the game heads are on, but we want them to really enjoy coming to Forres and play for us, and that's it. That and to show commitment to the team.”
Theman revealed that the club also plans to stage open trials in the summer in the effort to strengthen their squad of players.
Forres Thistle are also looking to bolster their committee team to help on match days, with social media and general fundraising.
Anyone interested can contact them through their Facebook page.
