ALLOA ace Calum Waters admitted he had never taken a penalty before last Saturday’s playoff shootout against Airdrie – but says he was always confident he would score.

The left-back netted the deciding spot-kick which sent the Wasps through to the Championship playoff final after a tense encounter against the Diamonds.

And he reckons the hours spent practicing penalties in training in recent weeks helped his side through.

Waters told Advertiser Sport: “It’s actually the first penalty I’ve ever taken in my life, but I felt before the game that if it went to penalties I definitely wanted to hit one. I got the chance and in that situation, you just get your head over it, hit it and hope it goes in. We have been working on penalties in training in the last few weeks because we knew there was a chance we could find ourselves in a shootout, so that has definitely paid off.”

The Wasps came into the second leg a goal behind on aggregate, but Waters thinks that could have played to their advantage as they knew exactly what was required.

He said: “We knew what we had to do, whereas Airdrie were probably in two minds as to whether they were going to go for more or whether they were going to sit back. We knew that if we scored we always had a chance, and to be honest we were the better team for 120 minutes.”

Alloa will now face Brechin for a place in the Championship, with the first game at Glebe Park on Wednesday before the return leg at the Indodrill Stadium on Saturday, and Waters says it’s important the players treat it like any other match in order to avoid piling extra pressure on themselves.

He added: “Brechin will give us a tough game as usual. It’s a final, but we will approach it like any other game and see where it takes us. We will go into it with the same mindset as we did against Airdrie. We will obviously be wary because they can be dangerous, but we are an attacking team so we don’t want to sit back at any time. We want to go there and play our normal game. We all know what’s at stake but we don’t want to put any extra pressure on ourselves so we will treat it like any other game. We just need to play the way we do.”