John McKeown admits Shotts’ focus is shifting to next season, with the West of Scotland League Conference A title all but sewn up by Arthurlie.
Shotts’ 2-1 defeat at Maybole on Saturday leaves the Hannah Park club five points behind Arthurlie, who have two games in hand.
Arthurlie also boast an unbeaten record, with 21 wins and two draws from their 23 matches, and McKeown says they’ll just start rebuilding at this point.
“We dominated possession and chances and just couldn’t score, and then got punished for a couple of wee individual mistakes at the back,” said boss McKeown on Saturday’s defeat.
“We’ve just ran out of a wee bit of luck at the wrong time and we seem to get punished for any wee mistakes, errors of judgement or switching off at our end.
“It’s just one of those spells in football that you get, and unfortunately it has come at the wrong point in the season.
“It’s allowing us now to concentrate on rebuilding for next season.
“We’ve tied quite a lot of our existing squad down and we’re going to look at five or six other ones, so we’re already well underway with that.
“We’ve got one or two agreed already, so that’s the priority for now.
“I’m looking at some of the under-20s players in our remaining games, and we’re already planning for next season, so that’s the priority for now.”
McKeown says the season will run its course, but admits the campaign has gone better than expected, with 20 wins from 25 games.
He said: “The season is petering out, but if you had told me in June that we would have been competing for the league I’d probably have laughed at you.
“We had almost a full rebuild to do after a couple of seasons out with Covid, which slashed our budget massively – almost in half.
“I probably wouldn’t have expected to challenge, but over the course of the season we were thinking ‘wait a minute here, we’ve got a wee chance if we can stay on Arthurlie’s shirt tails’.
“But to be fair, they’ve been relentless, and will deservedly be champions, especially when they’re unbeaten at this point, so there’s no arguments with that.”
McKeown says Shotts were missing “five or six key players” for the clash at Maybole and hopes to get some back for the derby visit by Bellshill this weekend.
He said: “We just need to get back to winning ways.
“Hopefully a wee bit of luck changes for us and we can have three or four of those players back for the weekend, so that’s a plus, and we’re looking forward to it.”
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