Accies captain encourages team to win for SPL safety

Mar 18 2010 by Andrew McGilvray, Hamilton Advertiser

ALEX Neil this week told his Hamilton team-mates they can take a massive step closer to SPL safety with a win over Falkirk on Saturday.

Steven Pressley’s basement battlers visit New Douglas Park for what is shaping up to be one of Accies’ key clashes of the season.

Saturday’s 1-0 win over St Mirren moved Accies six points clear of Falkirk and a home victory on Saturday would stretch that to nine with as many games remaining.

And Accies skipper Neil has his sights set firmly on leading his side away from the relegation zone.

He said: “I think Saturday’s win is going to be very important, especially with our next three games against Falkirk, Kilmarnock and St Johnstone – teams that are round about us in the table.

“We’ll take a lot of heart from that because it means the world to us. We’re dying to stay up and I think everybody could see on Saturday how much we’ll battle and fight to stay in this league.”

The 28-year-old midfielder added: “Saturday’s game against Falkirk is an important one. Now it’s like a snowball effect – every game is going to get bigger between now and the end of the season.

“It’s the same situation as we were in last year but I think against St Mirren we showed that we’re up for the fight and hopefully we can go on and get another result against Falkirk.

“We’ll have nine games left after Saturday and if we can be nine points clear it’s going to be massive for us.

“Falkirk and other teams at the bottom haven’t won a lot of games this season so it’s going to be a very tall order to go and claw those points back with only nine games left.

“But anything’s possible so we’ll just battle away and try to win every game that we play in.”

Neil was delighted with Saturday’s win over Saints, courtesy of Flavio Paixao’s stoppage-time winner.

He said: “I think we deserved to win.

“In the first 10-15 minutes we had two or three chances and could easily have gone ahead but the story of our season so far is that we can’t put our chances away.

“The longer the game went on we felt it wasn’t going to come, so we’re obviously delighted that Flavio popped up and stuck a header away.

“We’re just delighted that somebody stood up to the mark and scored the goal.

“There aren’t a lot of goals scored in this league so when you get one – especially when you’re at the bottom end – it means the world to you, so we’re delighted.”

Neil hopes that Accies start to get the rewards for what they put into games.

He said: “We dominate a lot of games now on the basis of play, but a lot of the time we don’t enforce our dominance with goals, which is something we’re trying to get better at.

“We’re certainly in games more than we were last year. I think last season at times we were beaten by the better team but I think this year very few occasions spring to mind in which we’ve been outplayed.

“We’ve played well in the last few weeks without winning and I think that’s the frustrating thing.

“We played St Mirren at their place and I thought we were the better side. We played Aberdeen here last week and I thought we were the better team, but we only picked up two points from both.

“To stay in the league you’ve got to score goals and I think everybody could see the relief from all the players when the goal went in.”