Dungannon boosted by derby delight

DUNGANNON head coach Jonny Gillespie believes the back-to-back derby wins his side have enjoyed will have boosted his players’ confidence ahead of their next match, a top of the table clash with Wanderers in Dublin tomorrow (Saturday).

After beating Rainey away from home and Clogher Valley at Stevenson Park on consecutive weekends, Dungannon will travel to Lansdowne Road believing they can defeat the Energia All-Ireland League 2B leaders, who lost for the first time this season at UL Bohemians last time out.

With just two points between the sides at the top of the table, Gillespie knows that victory in Dublin will take his side top of the standings, but he’s adamant that he’s not looking at, nor thinking about those particular details, with his team and the development of it being his only concern.

“We’re not worried about the league table,” he stressed. “We tend to be performance driven and process driven and we’re not looking at the table.

“We’re not getting too into it. We know that if we project ahead we still have to go to [the likes of] Clogher and get something because that’s just the way this league works, so we’re not getting ahead of that.

“This team has suffered before – they have had success before but they have suffered before – play-off defeats, good wins in Galway, so they know what the highs are like, they know what the lows are like and for us it’s about, if we play on momentum and emotion all of the time we will run out of that eventually.

“You have to rely on a process, you have to have checks during the game to ensure you’re hitting your marks or not and we do tend to bring it back to process and understanding of the game and yeah, when the momentum is with us we’ll ride it and when emotion is there we will ride it but when you lose games in this league you’re generally not as bad as you think you are and when you win you’re not as good as you think, so we just tend not to get carried away.

“We have a nice test, they are a good team, but we’ve won in Dublin two years ago, so we’ll go down with no fear at all. We actually had the best back-to-back training sessions [either side of the Rainey and Clogher clashes] so we’ll just try to repeat that and get a little bit better for Wanderers.

“We’re excited for the challenge but we’ll not look past the details or too far ahead of that.”