ALLAN MILNE has been appointed the new manager of Alloa Athletic Women FC.

Milne joins the club on a permanent basis, replacing Charles Dignan, who departed for Dunfermline at the end of November.

With the league set to restart this weekend, Milne sat down with Advertiser Sport to discuss his appointment and his aims for the club.

“I’m delighted to be appointed,” Milne said. “I’ve been out the game for a couple years now so over the past six months, it was about finding the right project for me to get back into.

“When I saw this role come up, I thought this was a great project for me to come in and hit the ground running and mould something good I can look back on.

“I’ve been involved in the women’s game for about 10 years. I was involved in university football at University of Glasgow for about three and a half years.

“From then, I moved on to Stenhousemuir where I stayed for about four years. When I went in, we had to rebuild the full club and integrate it, which was a real learning curve.

“This helped me learn in terms of recruitment, both in terms of recruiting the right players and recruiting the right coaching staff, so it was a good challenge.

“I’m currently working for Rangers Soccer Academy and work for various programmes there and I’ve been involved in coaching since I was 16 years old.”

While at Stenhousemuir, Milne had to focus a large amount of his time rebuilding the squad, coming into the job with only around six players.

At Alloa, Milne will be coming to a fully-established team, with the squad sitting at just shy of 20 players.

Milne continued: “From the conversations I’ve had with them, they all seem excited and seem to want to be here.

“Something that attracted me to the job was that there was a steady, talented group of players at the club.

“Myself and the coaching staff I’m bringing in are pleasantly surprised by what we’ve seen so far, we’ve got a good squad at the moment.

“There’s some tweaks that need to be made to get them up to speed with my style of football and how I like to play, but aside from that, we’re in a very good position.

“I do think I need to add about four or five players to build up the squad to account for injuries and other things.”

Alloa currently sit fourth in the Biffa West League, just six points behind Dunipace in first place.

Dignan engineered a season-long unbeaten run with Alloa, which Milne identified as a priority going forward.

He explained he sees a possibility of Alloa winning the league and hopes he can imprint his style of football in enough time to allow them to go and win it.

He added: “In the next six months, on a team level, we need to get them back to a structure again.

“They’ve been through a couple of managers in the past couple years so it’s about giving them the reassurance that we’re here for the long haul.

“I’ve told them I don’t see myself leaving for the next few years which is good.

“I want to tweak the style of play to suit me and to get them playing an attractive style of football, when people come to see Alloa I want people to think they’re attacking and exciting to watch.

“Looking at the league position and where we’re at, if you change some of the draws into wins and we’d be sitting in a better position.

“It’s not implausible for us to go and challenge for the league, there’s only six points in it so it’s up for grabs for anybody at the moment.

“For us, it’s about looking at those draws and figuring out how to change some of them into wins for the second half of the season and pick up as many points as possible.”