Saturday 26th February
3.00pm Kick Off
On Saturday we travel to County Armagh for our fourth meeting of the season with Glenavon.
Since losing to Linfield at The National Stadium in late January, Glenavon have enjoyed a positive run of recent form; going six games unbeaten - with three wins and three draws - to push themselves to within five points of sixth placed Coleraine and an outside chance of making the top half of the league split.
Manager Gary Hamilton will be frustrated not to be even closer to that target after last Saturday’s 3-3 draw at Ballymena; a game in which his side had led with 10 minutes remaining.
Even more frustrating for Hamilton were the sendings off of key defender Danny Wallace and midfielder Robbie Garrett, ruling both out of this fixture. It is likely that ex Glentoran player Sean Ward and former Carrick Rangers defender Andrew Doyle and will step up from the substitutes bench to replace them.
This will be the third meeting of the sides at Mourneview Park this season; in the previous league game at the start of October, a Luke McCullough header had given Glentoran a half time lead, only for Lurgan Blues top scorer Matthew Fitzpatrick to produce an equaliser with 20 minutes to go. Just 2 minutes later, however, a clumsy Glenavon challenge saw Glentoran awarded a penalty and Jay Donnelly made no mistake from the spot.
Just 10 days later in the League Cup, a goalless 90 minutes of normal time offered no indication of the drama that would follow.
Robbie McDaid opened the scoring nine minutes in, only for Glenavon to draw level 5 minutes later when Andrew Hall converted from a penalty. Jay Donnelly restored the Glens lead early into the second period before young Glenavon striker Josh Doyle took centre stage; firstly equalising with 1 minute of the tie remaining to take the tie to penalties but then going on to cannon his shoot out penalty off a post to send Glentoran through 5-4.
Mick McDermott: “Last Friday at Larne was a very poor performance from us after doing so well to beat Linfield. Apart from a 25-minute spell in the second half, around Rory’s excellent goal, we just didn’t do enough to get the result we wanted. We didn’t move the ball quickly enough and we looked flat and allowed Larne to get far too many shots on target.
The key thing is that the players turn the disappointment we felt at Larne into a determination to put in the right level of performance at Mourneview. That’s all I can ask. The attitude at training this week has been excellent, so we go to Lurgan in a positive frame of mind.
We’ve played Glenavon earlier this season and I have a lot of respect for them. They’re an experienced team with plenty of good players. They’re very capable. They played well against us earlier in the season and they got a good result against Crusaders a couple of weeks ago. All our games at Mourneview have been close and hard fought, so we’ll go into this one clearly understanding what we need to do.
For this one, Marcus is out after picking up a knock at Larne. He saw a specialist today, so we’ll soon know the full impact. It’s a shame as he’s done so well since he came back in. Sean Murray and Rhys Marshall are both okay after having to go off at Larne. Joe and Paddy are both suspended but Darren Cole has been training well and had 45 minutes for the Seconds on Monday night. So he can come into contention.”
