Chris Aitken was pleased to see goals spread throughout his East Kilbride team on Saturday as they bounced back from a nightmare start to book their place in the South Challenge Cup quarter-finals next month.
Kilby fell behind after just 54 seconds at Bo’ness Athletic when Timi Daramola gave the hosts a shock lead.
However, Kilby hit back just 12 minutes later through Jamie Stevenson, before a Neil McLaughlin double - the first a stunning strike into the top corner, the second a penalty - put them in command.
Athletic were reduced to 10 men early in the second half and Joao Victoria sealed the win with his 21st goal of the season after 66 minutes.
And Aitken was delighted to see the goals continue to be spread across the squad.
He said: “One thing we’ve got in our locker as a team is we do provide goals from all over the pitch and it was good to have others chipping in again on Saturday.
“I think if we’d scored a few more I don’t think Bo’ness would have complained. It was a professional performance, we’re into the next round and that’s all that matters. It was pretty comfortable in the end.
“We lost a goal in 54 seconds and we should have scored before that, believe it or not. But after that busy start we got back into the game, took control of it and scored some very good goals to be fair.”
EK’s quarter-final opponents are yet to be drawn, but more cup action awaits tonight when they kick-off their League Cup group section away to Dalbeattie Star. Caledonian Braves and Gretna 2008 complete the section.
It’s the second of three games in a week for EK - as well as their sixth away game on the bounce - and Aitken expects to ring the changes for the trip to Islecroft Stadium
He said: “This is the start of the League Cup section so we are hoping to get off to a winning ways in that, and then we’ll look forward to a home game against Stirling Uni because it seems such a long time ago we last played at K-Park.
”We are looking forward to that, but we need to deal with Dalbeattie first.
“It’s a long bus journey down there so we need to go and do the job. I’ll need to freshen things up because come Saturday, that will be three games in seven days, so it’s important we use the full squad.
“There’s been a few young boys on the bench and they deserve to be there because they’ve been doing really well in the development team.
“We’ve got the likes of BJ Coll coming back and he’ll get more game time on Wednesday as well. We need to keep the guys as fresh as we can because we want to finish the season strongly, and keep all the guys on their toes.”
Tonight’s clash is a 7.45pm kick-off and Saturday’s match with Stirling is a 3pm start.
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