Elgin City manager Gavin Price has urged his players to ignore the League Two table ahead of Saturday’s match against Stirling Albion.
Bottom side Cowdenbeath have closed the gap on Elgin in recent weeks, and will still have two games in hand on the Black and Whites by the end of this weekend.
It follows a poor sequence of results by the Moray outfit, who have lost their last five matches.
A win for Elgin would allow them to leapfrog this weekend’s opponents, who they trail by only two points.
Price says his players must not become fixated on the league standings however, as they bid to return to form in the remaining 10 games of the campaign.
Price said: “I’m just interested in the Stirling Albion game.
“The league table should not focus us. I’ve never been guilty of looking forward too much, and trying to think about what points we need to get into the play-offs.
“We have to focus on one game at a time. I know it’s the obvious cliche, but if we do that we have a squad of players that are more than capable of winning games of football.
“They have done it for a number of years, and we are underperforming in terms of results just now.
“It’s a three-week period since the end of January that has got us into this situation.
“I know we are capable, as we went six weeks without losing a game before that.
“There’s a Jekyll and Hyde about us that’s been there all season.
“We need to make sure we turn that a positive way again.”
Elgin boss aims to turn nip and tuck games in side’s favour
Price is expecting the majority of Elgin’s remaining games to be tightly-contested, and he says the Black and Whites must find the formula to turn results in their favour.
He added: “There’s not an awful lot between the teams in this league.
“Every game recently has been close. Even the Kelty Hearts game was closer than the 4-0 scoreline suggested.
“We have been in an awful lot of the games and decisions or key moments in games have gone against us in the last four or five games.
“We can’t just hope it happens, we’ve got to make things happen.
“There are fine margins between winning and losing games, and we’ve been on the losing side of it.
“Everything needs to be there, from how we start the game, the concentration and putting our bodies on the line defensively to prevent goals.
“We also need to be clinical and brave in the final third. That means getting into the box, when previously we have not been making that extra yard to get there.
“If we do that, there are going to be 10 pretty even games between now and the end of the season.
“We’ve got to find a way to battle our way through and win as many of them as we can.”
