Institute to dust themselves down after latest defeat

Manager Kevin Deery admits Institute need to become a hard team to beat and get back to basics.

The Drumahoe club host Premiership champions Larne tomorrow night in the Bet McLean League Cup before returning to league action with Armagh City, visiting the Ryan McBride Brandywell this Friday evening.

With two games scheduled in the space of just 72 hours, Deery also concedes that the likes of Gareth Muldoon, Rhys McDermott, Caoimhin Porter and Cormac Burke are all set to start against Tiernan Lynch’s men.

“Tuesday/Friday is going to be difficult for us and we’ll definitely mix our squad up for both games,” explained Deery.

“We’ll sit as staff and think what is the best way to go about the Larne game, because even with our best performance with all our best players there I still don’t think it’s anywhere near enough to get near Larne at the minute, to be totally honest.

“I think last year we came up with game plans and we were competitive in cup competitions, but it might be a game where we might have to sacrifice and get some young boys experience and some of our squad players can get game time, so that we can knuckle down for the Armagh game on Friday night.

“I don’t compare to last year, but it’s certainly a different group, which we have to find the best out of and we might need to get to January and bring a few strengtheners into the squad, because at the minute the group is crying out for something.

“Look for me to sit here and say everything is roses and not alarming. I wouldn't do that, so we have to patch up what we’re doing wrong here and I think we have to become hard to beat.

“We have to come up with a way to play over the next few weeks to get us to January and see if we can get some players in and move some players on. To be fair it has been difficult to attract the right players that we wanted, but we’ve made two or three good signings, so as I said we have to try and get to January and look to get three or four players in because at the minute we’re a group in there searching for something.

“Most successful dressing rooms are player driven and I would certainly say that our dressing room is staff driven at the minute and we’re trying to find solutions to a lot of problems that we have, but that’s all we can do.”

The Creggan native was bitterly disappointed by his side’s performance at both ends of the pitch in Saturday’s heavy home loss to Ards.

“It’s a disappointing result, especially when you go 1-0 down at the Brandywell and response, go behind again and response to make it 2-2 and after Evan’s goal the feeling throughout the staff was that we were going to push on and try to win the game, but it just totally flipped on its head, so we have to reflect on why it did.

“Look it shouldn’t happen and you can point the finger at other people, but our form has been no were near good enough all year and you can look for excuses, but only a few weeks ago we won three games in a row, showed real character in those games, so we’ll look into those games to see what we were doing right and try to get that back to the group.

“We tried a different system today, it got us into the opposing box a lot, but we had no quality around the box.

“Our retention of the ball was alright but we had no cutting edge and that’s the alarming bit for me. We’ve scored from a wonder strike from (Evan) Tweed and virtually direct from a corner, but outside of that we’re getting into really good areas, but it’s not good enough in and around the box in terms of decision making.

“We expect more out of our attacking players and our midfielders to give us more, but we’ve a lot of work to do, but we’re certainly suffering at the minute. We’ve suffered two heavy defeats in our last two games and it’s unacceptable to concede seven goals in our last two games and it was our seventh loss.”

Teenaged goalkeeper Fintan Doherty unfortunately had an afternoon to forget on Saturday, as he was unfortunately at fault for three of Ards’ four goals, but Deery is backing his young squad.

“Their first goal, it has happened to us two or three times already this season, he was done off his line, which can happen,” he explained.

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“The second was a good finish, but I need to see it back, but obviously their third and fourth goals, which has gone on for them to get the victory are two preventable goals, but again these are young players who we’re giving an opportunity to play senior football.

“Fintan is only a young kid, so look, he's going to have to learn from this and go again. The one thing about him, he’ll not shirk it, he’ll own it, he’ll come in and train and will get better.

“Look, all we can do is when we make mistakes we can’t go under and come again and that’s what I’ll be encouraging Fintan to do.”