Clydebank Manager Budgie McGhie speaks exclusively to Clydebank Mad on the eve of the Sectional League Cup kicking off the competitive season

"We have now completed our pre-season schedule and I have to be reasonably pleased with what I‘ve seen. We’ve played 6 games, scored 16 goals and conceded only 4 which included 2 clean sheets. Having made a number of changes to the squad it would have been easy to take the softly, softly approach and line up games against amateur or lower league opposition to allow the new guys to bed in. But we decided to take on quite a stiff schedule of games against generally testing opposition, which is normally my preference, yet we still produced some decent stuff despite chopping and changing team line ups. The performances have thrown up far more “positives” than “concerns” but we now have to attempt to build further on those performances as we make the transition into competitive fixtures. I have warned the players that the games we now face in our sectional league cup campaign will throw up different types of contests and this should make it interesting to see if we handle them as well as we did in our pre-season tests.

As well as the influx of younger players we’ve recently agreed terms with Maybole and Glenafton to sign defenders Barry Crawford and Gordon Moffat respectively and barring any last minutes hitches they should come on board before too long. Unfortunately Barry had a work commitment abroad which has resulted in him being unavailable for a few weeks.

Stevie Dallas is showing signs of improvement with his injury but we won’t rush him back. He would be missing most of the games in August with wedding commitments anyway so there is no need to risk aggravating the injury.

Brian Smith has missed all our recent games but should now have returned from holiday; we’ll assess his fitness at training this week but he’ll obviously be a bit short of match fitness. This leaves us with only Chris Mackie and Martin McInnes on the longer term injury list. Our opening game is an away fixture against Maryhill. They had a decent result against Pollok on Saturday which is an indication that they could be a difficult outfit to break down and the fact that they have quite a few ex Bankies in their ranks could make it even more difficult."

©Clydebank Mad August 4th 2010