Scott Booth shared his thoughts after his Aberdeen Women side fell to a 4-2 defeat against The Spartans at the Balmoral.

“I think we started the game okay, and we controlled the possession like we wanted to and I felt like at that point, maybe the first fifteen minutes or so, we were comfortable. Obviously, we managed to get the first goal. And then I think from there on in, we became much more sort of negative in our play.

“We kept the ball in our back line for far too long. We laboured in possession, and we made mistakes which brought Spartans on us. We were actually handing them opportunities because of our either sloppy play or laboured play, and that meant that they had opportunity to score, put ourselves into difficult positions. I felt like we were quite static today. There wasn’t a lot of movement in possession. There weren’t enough players giving enough options. And all in all, I think that too many players today were well below the standards that we expect.

“We didn’t deserve to win the game. We caused too many of our own problems today. We’ll need to be better on Wednesday against Montrose because we know that they’re always tough games.

“I don’t want to highlight the goalkeeping injuries too much. Zoe’s not played for a long time, and we were down to one goalkeeper today. But, she saved a pen for us today. I don’t think that we helped her at all. I think in the first half in particular, we kept playing the ball back to her rather than playing the ball forward. And that for me was just nonsensical and definitely wasn’t part of the game plan. And I don’t think the players covered themselves in glory with that because they should have been trying to help a young goalkeeper that’s come in by keeping the ball, getting up the pitch as much as we possibly can, and then you make sure that we’re helping a young keeper to have a good game. And I think we didn’t do that.

“I don’t know whether Annalisa will be back by Wednesday yet. We’ll just need to wait and see. This was a winnable game for us, and we didn’t do what we had to do, which we normally have been doing recently to win the games. We didn’t deserve it. Last thing we need is to come out of a game on Wednesday with the same sort of feeling, but we know that it’s going to be a real battle against Montrose because that’s the way it generally is when we play them. And it’s never an easy game, so we need to get back on it again.

“It’s about standards. It’s about making sure that once you’ve set a standard in any given game and the players play to those high standards, you can’t afford to let that drop.

“Because if they drop, you’re not playing anywhere near your best. And if it’s not just one or two players, it’s maybe six, seven, eight players that drop our standards, then you’re never going to win a game. Today, it was just poor. We didn’t after the first fifteen, twenty minutes play anywhere near like ourselves.”