Kilby’s new boss played under the great Scot for half his career… so many of his methods will be brought to the table
to play attacking football, I want to shift the ball, play at a high tempo. I want players who can beat a player and guys who can score goals. “If you spoke to aspiring managers coming in, they’d probably tell you the same thing. “But it has to be done off a solid defensive base. “I’m really pleased we’ve got that at East Kilbride. “David Proctor, Barry Russell, Craig Howie, Scott Stevenson, BJ Coll, Dom McLaren – there’s a nucleus of good defenders there that have proven they can do it.
“My job now is to get the team functioning the way I want it to, so that when a team is better than us for parts of a game, we can accept we are not having the best day and still do what we need to do to win the game.”
While Ferguson’s influence is clear, it doesn’t mean Stark has styled himself on the two-time European Cup winner and insists there won’t be any of the infamous ‘hairdryer’ treatment at K-Park.
He said: “It would be an insult to Alex’s intelligence to think that he just had to shout at players to get the best out of them.
“A manager has got to understand what makes a player tick. They need to see your anger at times, yes, but not shouting and bawling at them all the time. That’s never been my style anyway. You need to be constructive.
“It’s been proven now that you need to get the players onside. Even the ones that aren’t playing, they need to enjoying training. “I’m basically a players’ man. “I love players and if they want to do the best for the club, that’s good for me.
“But I’m not going in there to try and be somebody else. Players will see through that and know that you are not being yourself. “That’s where you lose credibility. “I want the players to have the ambition that I have and that the owners have. That’s the balance I need to find.”
As Stark looks towards the new Lowland League season at the end of the month (EK start at home to Dalbeattie Star on July 29), the words of his old boss still ring in his ear when he’s asked about the task of living up to last season’s campaign.
EK won 24 games and lost just three times on their way to the title, which they eventually won by seven points from East Stirlingshire – the first club Ferguson managed back in 1974.
“I can remember Alex saying to us at the start of a season when I was at Aberdeen that we could only afford to lose four or five league games and that’s it,” said Stark.
“That’s a hell of a pressure to cope with.
“If you study most league tables, four, five, six games is probably the most you can afford to lose.
“However, I think you have to target how many games you can win and East Kilbride won 24 out of 30 last season. That’s pretty impressive.
“We’ll need to find that level again this season.”
It would be an insult to Alex’s intelligence to think that he just had to shout at players to get the best out of them