ALLOA caretaker manager Paddy Connolly believes Alloa deserved their win on Saturday in the club's first match since Barry Ferguson's resignation.

With Ferguson leaving on Monday and fellow assistant manager Bob Malcolm also gone, Connolly took the team alongside Andy Graham in preparation for the 2-1 victory over Dumbarton.

Connolly said: "I thought, overall, we deserved to win. The second half was really good and everyone, to a man, they worked hard, worked their socks off.

"You could see the pitch was really heavy and we dealt with the conditions really well in the first half."

Alloa's winner came from a mistake by former Wasps keeper Kieran Wright but Connolly was keen to praise Adam King's endeavour.

Connolly said: "The one thing I said to the guys was if we can avoid passing it back to Hutts [David Hutton], let's try and avoid it.

"There was a couple of times he had to deal with a couple of hand grenade passbacks and that's how we got the goal.

"Kieran's mishit it, you can see it's took a bit of a bobble, but to be fair to Kingy he's pressed and got the reward from that."

Connolly said the news of Ferguson's departure didn't interfere with the team's preparation and said they've worked hard, like they have all season.

"Obviously it was disappointing," Connolly continued. "Barry resigned on Monday and on Tuesday…to be fair the boys have been working hard in training, you could see last week [defeat to East Fife] there's a wee bit [of] lack of belief once we go down to 10 men and sometimes all it takes is a goal to give you a lift and we got that [on Saturday].

"The boys worked hard in training [last week] but there's been no times this season where they've been lacking effort. It's something for the new manager to build on."

Looking ahead to the future, Connolly isn't concerned with looking at the league table but did confirm the new manager has asked him to continue on until the end of the season.

He continued: "To be honest I don't even want to look at the league table at this stage, initially after today it's definitely to try and avoid the play offs at the bottom but now we've got something to build on and if we go on a run of wins then you never know.

"It's a long way to go so as I say it gives the [new] manager something to build on.

"The manager's asked me to stay until the end of the season and then we'll take it from there – I'm happy to do that and he says he's going to need me to lean on.

"He knows a fair few of the players, but I'll try and help him with the ones he's not sure about.

"The second half I thought we played some excellent football on a really difficult pitch, there's a lot of positives for the manager to choose from.

"We'll work hard on Tuesday and be ready for the game on Saturday."