Dundalk aim to return to winning ways against Bray

Dundalk FC will aim to return to winning form this Friday night at Oriel Park as they host Bray Wanderers in a highly anticipated top-of-the-table encounter in the SSE Airtricity League First Division (kick-off, 7:45pm).

Unbeaten in 13 matches, The Lilywhites hold a four-point lead over second-placed Bray, having been held to their fourth draw of the season last time out at Athlone Town.

Meanwhile, Bray’s seven-match winning run came to an end on the same night, as they endured a last-gasp 2-1 defeat at the hands of Cobh Ramblers, who now trail by five points and have reignited their push in the promotion race.

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The next two fixtures promise to be pivotal in Dundalk’s season, as they first welcome Bray to Oriel for their inaugural visit since 2018, before travelling to St Colman’s Park to face Cobh the following week.

“We’ve gained one point on Bray, and Cobh have gained two on us,” Dundalk manager Ciaran Kilduff told The Democrat following their goalless draw in Athlone. “We’re not getting dragged into anything just yet. We have to play well next week now and react.

“Athlone are not a bad team and have some good players. They have some quality players who were playing Premier Division football last year, and we’ve picked up four points from six against them.

“If you’d said at the start of the season you’d have done that against them with the quality they have, you’d probably have taken it.

“But on tonight’s reflection, we’re thinking we would’ve loved to have got that goal that we felt, especially our build-up, deserved, and it just never came.”

He added: “We have to come up with the solutions. You could see when we got the first goal in Longford, what it does, it changes the game, and we need to be better in the moments in the final third when it’s 0-0.

The spaces aren’t going to be huge; it’s going to be a moment of magic to score a goal, but once that comes, we’ll get opportunities to progress. It just never came. It has in previous weeks, but it just didn’t happen tonight.

“It’s very difficult. It’s hard to break teams down, and teams are happy just to take a point and move on. We know what we signed up for this year.

“At times we’re going to have games like that, but we need to be better ourselves when we get into those moments.

“When we get those opportunities in advanced areas, can we be better? Can we be more penetrating, and can we put teams to the sword quicker and sooner?

“We didn’t tonight, and maybe we didn’t in one or two previous games, but that’s the first time this season we haven’t scored. It’s a little bit of a disappointment, but we’ve scored in all the other games — it just never came tonight.”

Having collected his fifth yellow card of the season, Aodh Dervin will be sidelined for the clash against Bray as he serves a one-match suspension, while fellow midfielder Harry Groome remains a doubt to face his former club after being forced off with an injury in Athlone.

On a more positive note, goalkeeper Enda Minogue returns to contention after a 10-match absence with a broken finger and will be available for selection against the very club where he began his League of Ireland journey as a 16-year-old debutant against Dundalk seven years ago.

Looking ahead to the forthcoming clashes with Bray and Cobh, Kilduff remarked: “You win them, you’ll stretch it. You don’t win them, it’s going to get tight again, but we’re not even halfway. We’ve had a great start to this point, but we’ve two massive games coming, and it’s one game at a time.

“Obviously Bray next, hopefully we get a big support out, we get a big crowd behind us, and we push on and try and get a bigger gap than we already have.

“We’re four points clear at the top and yet to lose a game, so we’re delighted. Somewhere along the way we are going to lose a game of football — it’s how you react then. No one said this was going to be easy. We have no entitlement to anything here.

“We’re top of the league. We’re working hard, we’re unbeaten, we’ve a lot of positives in our armoury so far this year. I have a great group of lads. We brought a huge support here tonight. We’re doing okay.”