Max Christie interview: Bo'ness United boss hoping to ease pain of back-to-back defeats with win over Cumbernauld Colts

Bo’ness United manager Max Christie is hoping to ease the pain of back-to-back Scottish Lowland Football League losses to Vale of Leithen and Celtic B by getting a positive result at home to Cumbernauld Colts this Saturday.
Max Christie is looking to lead Bo'ness to a first win in three games this SaturdayMax Christie is looking to lead Bo'ness to a first win in three games this Saturday
Max Christie is looking to lead Bo'ness to a first win in three games this Saturday

Coronavirus-induced postponements mean that Christie’s men haven't played since the 4-1 reverse against the Hoops’ second string on December 18.

"Anybody who runs a football team will tell you that defeats are hard,” Christie told the Falkirk Herald. “But you need to dust yourself down and get going again.

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"We’ve had a couple of bad ones but I think prior to that we were on a good run.

"So we need to get back to competing, matching other teams’ physicality and seeing where it takes us.

"The Cumbernauld game will be tough because we’ve been inactive recently. We had just been training but then we couldn’t even train because of Covid.

"Cumbernauld gave us a doing at their place the last time – when we’d had about five games in two weeks. We will absolutely need to be at our best and hopefully we can get a result.

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"We trained on Tuesday and hopefully we’ll get to train Thursday (tonight) but it’s just getting over the punches day by day.”

Bo’ness go into the Cumbernauld game having had a blank Saturday last weekend, when their scheduled league fixture at East Stirlingshire was postponed as the BUs were waiting on players’ PCR test results.

Five Bo’ness players were self isolating this week. Christie, speaking on Wednesday morning, said he supported any moves by the Scottish Government to match every other country in the UK by reducing the coronavirus self isolation requirement from 10 days.

Although the new Omicron coronavirus variant is more transmissible – with a daily average of 16,000 daily cases in Scotland this week – Christie stressed that it does not appear to be as deadly as previous strains.

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"It seems to be less severe,” Christie said. “I don’t think there’s the same amount of folk dying from it as there was previous strains.

"I’d be surprised if they shut our football down.”

Scottish football crowds are currently limited to a maximum of 500 due to the surging Omicron strain and Christie explained how much impact this has on his club.

"Our average isn’t far away from 500 at games,” he said. “When you’re playing bigger teams and they bring fans as well we’re above that. But it’s manageable.”