Factors behind turmoil for Blue Brazil

One defeat will send Cowdenbeath out of the Scottish Professional Football League today.

It has been a rapid and depressing decline for a proud club which, only two years ago was in the Championship alongside Hearts, Hibernian and Rangers.

So how has this annus horribilis panned out to leave the future of the Blue Brazil as a senior outfit in severe doubt for the first time since 1881?

LIAM FOX. Most people think the appointment of Ian Cathro as first-team coach was the decision with the most serious implications that involved Hearts. Cowdenbeath fans would say different. Fox – a youth coach at Tynecastle – was a project manager Hearts hoped would return with experience at the sharp-end to accelerate his progression. He got experience, all right, and, he’s back at Hearts. But it was too much, too soon for him at Central Park and, when he quit in March, Cowdenbeath were cut adrift at the bottom of League Two.

DEAN BRETT. Fox certainly got an education. Dean Brett saw to that. The defender got caught out for betting on his own team to lose matches in which he was playing and, after an internal investigation, was dismissed. Brett placed bets on 6,369 fixtures with 11 bookmakers, but also bet on 65 matches involving Cowdenbeath. The club acted as sympathetically as could be expected in the circumstances, accepted the player had issues and offered to pay for the remainder of his contract.

TOO BIG A GAP TO BRIDGE. The fact Cowdenbeath are in the dreaded pyramid play-off does not reflect the job carried out by Gary Locke. When he took over, the team hadn’t won in 15 games and were seven points from safety at the foot of the table. They had also been dumped out of the Scottish Cup by today’s opponents (all 10 men of them). Locke had an instant impact and Cowdenbeath still had a chance of staying up going into the last game of the season.

PENALTIES. A 0-0 draw in the first leg at East Kilbride wasn’t the worst result to take back to Fife, but will a penalty miss come back to haunt them? In fact, will penalty misses come back to haunt them? Kyle Miller’s spot-kick failure was Cowden’s sixth in a row. If today’s second leg goes all the way to a shoot-out, finding volunteers might not be an easy job for Locke.