SETANTA CUP AND LEAGUE OF IRELAND:WHILE BOHEMIANS may be struggling to get their league campaign into top gear, Linfield's season is coasting along rather nicely ahead of this evening's Setanta Cup semi-final second leg encounter with the Dubliners at Windsor Park.
David Jeffrey’s side won an eventful Irish cup tie with Coleraine over the weekend to reach this season’s final while a win over Crusaders on Saturday will wrap up yet another league title.
Between them, the seven-point cushion they currently enjoy at the top of the table and the five-day gap before the trip to Seaview mean that Jeffrey will not, as he did for the Dalymount Park leg a couple of weeks ago, have to rest key players. While he insists that he expects Bohemians to produce a reaction to their defeats at the hands of Shamrock Rovers and Galway United, the northerner may well sense a big opportunity to overturn a 2-1 deficit.
“They’ll be coming to Windsor hurting,” he says. “They’ll want to kick-start their season because they’ve been stuttering a little bit. But we don’t have a league game until the Saturday so I probably won’t have to make the same number of changes.”
Linfield’s away goal doesn’t count double but, given their form of late, they are unlikely to be overly daunted by the single goal advantage that Pat Fenlon’s men take into the game.
Fenlon, indeed, knows better than most how difficult it will be to preserve that lead and book a place in next month’s final against St Patrick’s Athletic.
“We’re a goal up but we’re going to have to play a lot better than we did against Galway if we’re to get anything out of it,” he said. Bohs are likely to be without Mark Rossiter (hamstring) and Anto Murphy (Achilles tendon) as well as cup-tied trio Ruairdhi Higgins, Stephen Gray and Gareth McGlynn, all of whom played for Derry City earlier in this year’s competition.
In the league, meanwhile, Dundalk can go back to the top of the table if they can win this evening’s rescheduled game at Terryland Park where Galway United will be hoping to build on Friday’s dramatic victory at Dalymount by taking all three points and joining what is currently a six-team leading pack that is separated by just three points.
Tiarnan Mulvenna and Alan Cawley will again be missing for the visitors while Stephen O’Donnell will be suspended for the hosts after his late sending off in Dublin. Gary Curran and Thomas Heary are also likely to miss out through injury but Jamie McKenzie could make his return.
