McLaughlin urges Accies boss to get in more goals

Jul 2 2009 by Andrew McGilvray, Hamilton Advertiser

MARK McLaughlin this week urged boss Billy Reid to bolster Hamilton’s firepower as they face a battle to stay in the SPL for a second season.

McLaughlin is well aware of the financial difficulties facing Scottish clubs as the SPL tries to secure a television deal for the coming season, but knows Accies need a stronger squad.

Although they enjoyed a good campaign, Hamilton scored only 30 league goals, and ‘Marko’ knows it’s an area they must improve on.

He said: “One thing I’ve learned from last season in the SPL is that we must take our chances. It’s a hard league and at this level you get punished a lot more. There isn’t much between the teams – on a lot of occasions if you make one mistake they will score.

“We need to strengthen our strikeforce. We’ve got Richie Offiong, who had a lot of injuries last season but hopefully he can get a good pre-season under his belt and start banging in the goals again.

“We don’t know much about the budget but as a player you hope the club can strengthen so that we can fight to stay in the league, and for that we will need better players.

“I think we have a good squad just now, but we need players that can come off the bench and make a difference, so hopefully we will be able to strengthen and push on – if we could do better than last season that would be brilliant.”

Mark is disappointed to be suspended for the opening two games of Hamilton’s SPL campaign, and admitted he’d rather sit out clashes against the Old Firm.

Hamilton head to Kilmarnock on the opening day, before welcoming Aberdeen to New Douglas Park seven days later, and McLaughlin sees both as teams Accies will need to compete against.

He said: “I’m extremely disappointed to be suspended. I knew at the end of last season that I was close to a suspension, but I thought it was just for one game so to miss two is disappointing.

“I miss the games at Killie and at home to Aberdeen, so I’ll just need to make sure I work hard in pre-season and make sure I’m fit for Rangers at Ibrox.

“I hate missing any game and try not to get suspended. To be honest I’d rather miss games against Rangers and Celtic.

“I’ve played against them and enjoyed that experience, and I would rather play in games against teams that we need to compete with to stay in the league.”

At 33 Mark isn’t the youngest in Hamilton’s squad, but although he’s not looking forward to the club’s return to pre-season training on July 7, he has been working hard throughout the summer.

He explained: “I never look forward to pre-season training – I don’t think any player does – but I’ve worked through the summer, coming in a couple of days a week.

“I was at (former Accies team-mate) Mark Gilhaney’s wedding over in Cyprus and I trained while I was there – the only problem is that I came back with a chest infection, so I can’t train as hard as I would like to.”