BOHEMIANS v SLIGO ROVERS
SSE Airtricity League, Dalymount Park, Monday 21 April, 3pm
Bohemians are looking to halt a slump of two defeats in a row when they host Sligo Rovers on Easter Monday. A poor performance at home to Limerick nine days ago was followed up with a much improved display away to the champions St Patrick’s Athletic on Friday evening, yet yielded the same result.
Manager Owen Heary bemoaned his players’ costly mistakes but found some positives too. He said: “I was happier that we played a lot better against St Pat’s than we had in some of the previous few games. We created chances, which we hadn’t done against Limerick.
“But Pat’s are a very experienced side throughout compared to the team we had out. They will let you play football the right way but they’ll also punish you if you make mistakes and that’s what happened.
“It was a fantastic goal from Jason Byrne to give us the lead but we only managed to hold on to the lead for four minutes and that’s really not good enough.
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“We work hard all week on trying to eradicate individual mistakes from our game, so it’s frustrating when it happens again. They’re not small mistakes. They’re big ones if they’re costing us goals and results.”
The fixture list hasn’t helped Bohs’ bid to get more points on the board but Heary has challenged his players to step up and prove their worth.
He said: “You could say we’re unfortunate in that we’re playing three of the best sides in the league – Pat’s, Sligo and Cork – in a row but that’s what the players should want. They should be wanting to go out and play against the best in the league – to push themselves, to better themselves and test themselves against the very best.
“We all knew Sligo were going to come good eventually and they’ve shown that in their last few games where they’ve scored goals for fun against St Pat’s and UCD and got a good draw away to Cork in between. We know we’re up against one of the best teams around.”
Heary admitted the return of club captain Dave Mulcahy, who played the full 90 minutes on Friday in what was his first appearance since the opening day of the league season after knee and calf injuries, was a “massive plus” but he is set to tinker with his line-up again as there are “a lot of tired bodies”.
“We did very well to get 90 minutes out of Jason too,” he added. “We would have liked to have taken him off after around 70 minutes but with Dinny Corcoran out, Jay was the best person to get us back into the game so we had to leave him on. But there were a lot of tired bodies on Friday and you don’t want to be flogging players, so we will change things around in certain areas.”
Heary’s options are limited by the continued absence of Corcoran, who will have a scan on his knee injury on Tuesday, as well as Anto Murphy (hamstring) and Jack Memery (knee). Goalkeeper Dean Delany returns to the squad after serving his additional one-match ban for the red card he received against Bray Wanderers earlier this month.
