Friday 15th April
7.45 pm Kick Off
Tomorrow evening on Good Friday we travel to the National Stadium at Windsor Park to face Linfield in the final Big Two game of the season.
Honours are even between the clubs this season with one win each and a draw. The opening game at the Bet McLean Oval was a relatively easy day out for Linfield as goals from Green, Hume (both now away from the club) and Palmer in the first fifty minutes made the Blues comfortable 3-0 winners. The post Boxing Day game in South Belfast was a story of strength and resilience from the Glens as, playing for over thirty minutes without the influential Conor McMenamin, the ten man Glens gave everything they had and got their just desserts on t2 minutes when Jay “the Striker” Donnelly rose to head home a Hrvoje Plum free kick to wipe out Trai Hume’s first half equaliser. McMenamin was key to our victory at the Bet McLean Oval in February, scoring the only goal of the game in a highly deserved home win for the Glens.
That win put the Glens three points clear at the top of the table. However since then we have taken just ten points from the available twenty-one, with the result that the Blues now hold a six-point lead over us at the top of the table. However the Glens record in these fixtures should offer plenty of encouragement to players and supporters as we have lost just one of the last nine Big Two games and have not lost at the National Stadium since September 2019.
Mick McDermott: “We can’t deny that last week’s performance against Crusaders was a very poor one. The first people to admit that were the players and coaching staff, so we empathise with the fans….it simply was not to the expected levels! It was unexpected but the first half performance in particular was well short of what I and the supporters expect. The players responded well to our half time talk and I thought we started the second half well, with Michael O’Connor showing a lot of presence after he came on. But conceding the third goal was criminal and obviously it was always going to be hard from there. We fell down on the basics of defending and put ourselves under a lot of unnecessary pressure at bad times. Overall it was as poor as I’ve seen any Glentoran performance since I’ve been here, and we owe the supporters an apology and much better performances between now and the end of the season.
There is no better way to bounce back from a poor performance than in a Big Two match at the National Stadium. There is still plenty to play for in the Danske Bank Premiership and a good performance and result against Linfield. The players have worked very hard this week and are in a very good frame of mind for the challenges of the next few weeks. We go into this one with the confidence we've gained through a very good record in these fixtures over the past three seasons.”
