CORK CITY MANAGER John Caulfield said he is just focused on getting performances out of his team in the remaining weeks of the season and is not looking at Dundalk’s build up of fixtures as a positive for his side.
The league and cup holders drew with Derry City in the first semi-final on Sunday and will have to travel to the Brandywell on Tuesday for a replay as part of their gruelling schedule.
“Well I’m not really interested in them (Dundalk)”, Caulfield said after Sunday’s semi-final win over St Patrick’s Athletic.
“I know people like to make comparisons and I just heard the result before kick-off but I don’t really care. I’m the manager of Cork City and it’s a very, very difficult job.
“Our budget is substantially less than Dundalk’s but I don’t make excuses and I want to get players working hard and this year we’ve a really good team and a great attitude. We’ve closed the gap and whether we can take a trophy or not remains to be seen but certainly we feel we’ve a much better chance this year.”
Two of the Leesiders’ stand-out performers in the victory over Pat’s were Sean Maguire and Kevin O’Connor, with the duo called-up to the Republic of Ireland U21 squad for this week’s European Championship qualifiers.
The City boss added that it doesn’t help the momentum of his side when leading scorer Maguire and O’Connor have to go away on international duty.
“Unfortunately we’ve suffered this year,” he said, “While it’s an honour for the lads to be called-up, there’s no doubt as a club we’ve suffered with the two lads being called up from the point of view that early in the season we were top of the league. We beat Dundalk and the following two weeks they didn’t play because they were on international duty so we had a backlog of games.
“Touch wood they’ll be okay for Saturday but it’s not ideal. At this stage though we have no choice and we’re ending up playing three games a week from now until the finish so we just hope they come through the games unscathed.”
Caulfield said he feels the proposal to extend the league to 40 weeks is a positive move as his side have felt the effects of the fixture build up. He did maintain though that his side can beat Dundalk to the double.
“Up to the end of the league season, we’ll have played six times in Europe and at the moment Dundalk have played eight and they’ve one European game to go so at the end of the season the difference between us and them is going to be four games, including the replay,: he said.
“A lot of the chasing up has always been done by us. We’re the team that has been playing catch-up in the league all season and if you look at the table we’ve constantly had two games in hand and that’s because of the international call-ups. That’s why I think we’ve suffered, plus we’d the early round in Europe to play.
“With the likes of Shiels and Keane coming in, they’ve a better squad, but at the end of the day it’s really about us. We’ve seven games to go and we still feel in the league we’ve a chance.”
The42 is on Snapchat! Tap the button below on your phone to add!