Edinburgh City 'must refocus' after losing their way in title race, says Conrad Balatoni

Conrad Balatoni admits he’s stunned at how quickly Edinburgh City’s title bid has unraveled.

Three weeks ago the Ainslie Park side, who had spent the entire campaign on the on the coat-tails of Cove Rangers, had the chance to move joint-top of the table if they had won their top-of-the-table clash with the long-time leaders at Balmoral Stadium.

Despite taking the lead, City suffered a 2-1 defeat in a tightly-contested encounter and since then they have lost their way, with back-to-back draws against Cowdenbeath and Brechin City allowing Cove to open up a commanding ten-point advantage with just ten games remaining.

'Last few weeks have not been good enough'

While Balatoni is refusing to concede the title just yet, he acknowledges that his side have left themselves with a mountain to climb.

“It shows what this league is like that having been up there within three or six points of them for so long, it’s just taken a couple of bad results for Cove to take advantage and for us to drop off the pace,” the centre-back told the Evening News.

“It’s a bit mental but we’ve only got ourselves to blame. The last few weeks have not been good enough.

“We obviously got ourselves within touching distance of Cove before we went there. You could argue we didn’t deserve to get beat but we did. After that, it was up to us to keep the pressure on them and hope they would slip up but we’ve not been good enough since then. We’ve fallen away and it’s now going to be a tough ask for us to win the league because Cove have got the momentum. You can never say never, but we know it’s going to be difficult now.”

Citizens must refocus

City host Albion Rovers on Saturday and Balatoni knows his side must refocus and finish the season with a flourish.

“We’ve just got to focus on getting our confidence back and getting our form right between now and the end of the season,” he said. “We know we’ve not been good enough recently and we need to raise our standards again because we’ve probably let them drop. It’s all well and good me saying that, we’ve got to go out and do it. We want to finish strongly because if we do end up in the play-offs we want to go in with the best form possible and with confidence.

“We’ve just got to keep plugging away, get as many points as we can and see where it takes us.

If Cove slip up, we’ve got to make sure we’re able to close the gap. But if they don’t slip up, we’ve just got to hold our hands up.

“If we don’t finish first, we want to make sure we finish second. Strange things happen in football so we’re not going to say it’s over but it’s very difficult for us to say we’re going to win the league now. We’re going to try and get maximum points in every game between now and the end of the season and hopefully that will take us away from (third-place) Cowdenbeath and closer to Cove.”