Photo: Rachel McDonald

By Brian Bennett

Ashington FC manager Ian Skinner says he fully expects Danny Anderson to put Tuesday night’s penalty miss firmly behind him – and move on.

After the game had finished 2-2 after 90 minutes, the midfielder stepped up to take his sides fourth spot kick in the shoot out against Newcastle United under 23’s – and saw it pushed away by young Magpies ‘keeper Will Brown.

Nathan Carlyon then converted for Newcastle which booked them a place in the semi finals of the Techflow Marine Northumberland Senior Cup: “Penalties become a lottery,” said Skinner afterwards, “I got the players on the pitch before we took them and said to them: ‘listen whatever happens from here, we can have no regrets.’ During the game itself, I had feared we were going to have regrets of what might have been – but in that spell in the second half, when we came from 2-0 down against a professional outfit to get back to 2-2 we’ve shown people what we are capable of and we need to take that forward now into the next few games.” He continued: “I asked who wanted to take one (a penalty) and the lads were brave enough to put there hands up with my only advice being to make sure they hit the target. Unfortunately somebody is going to miss one – and tonight it was young Danny Anderson. The penalty was on target but the ‘keeper has saved it and that happens. However, the pleasing thing is Danny is quite a laid back character and it’s probably not something which will faze him too much. Being a young lad, he’ll probably shrug it off a little bit – and I’m comfortable with that because I don’t want him to dwell on it.”