Longford Town facing a tricky trip to Tralee to tackle Kerry FC

Longford Town make the long journey to Tralee this Friday when they take on Kerry FC at Mounthawk Park, kick-off 7.45pm.

 After their first year in the league this new look Kerry outfit have strengthened their squad and also have a very youthful manager in Conor McCarthy who replaced last year's boss Billy Dennehy. 

McCarthy has his team fighting for every positive result and at this stage they have 5 points from eight games played. 

To date they have drawn five games against UCD, Wexford, Finn Harps, Cobh and Athlone. 

Kerry FC lost two games at home against Treaty United (1-0) and Bray (3-2) while they were also defeated 2-0 by Cork City at Turner's Cross. 

Kerry only accumulated a total of ten points last  season, including the draw against the Town in the final meeting of the clubs in early September when the game ended scoreless at Bishopsgate.

This season you can see the improvement and that is down to the new management that the club have put together and one has to say that currently Kerry are playing some great attacking football. 

The Tralee based club have also tightened up at the back and this is definitely from the influence of new manager McCarthy.

 Last season the Town won three of the games against Kerry. On April 1 they beat Kerry 2-0 at Bishopsgate with a double from Josh Giurgi in the 10th and 89th minutes.

 The next meeting was in early May and on that occasion Longford had to fight for the full 90 minutes for a 3-2 victory at Mounthawk Park. The Town's scorers on that occasion were Stephen Meaney, Shane Elworthy and a Keane OG.

The next game was in mid July at Bishopsgate where the Town again had to battle hard for all three points. There is no doubt that Kerry improved as the season progressed last season and that has continued this season.

There are more new faces in their squad this year and no doubt they have made a big difference and they don't seem to be missing Gaxha who moved to Galway United.

The Town, on the other hand, are struggling for any type of form this season which is quite embarrassing with this being our centenary year. 

Some players seem to have lost form and then we have the problem with a never ending list of injured players.

 The team are struggling in front of goal and we have Chris Lyons playing up front on his own. Chris missed the UCD game and returned against the new look Cobh side on their new astro pitch on Easter Monday.

We took the lead coming up to half-time with the help of a Cobh defender but like in other previous games we couldn't hold out. 

We all know that the loss of Viktor Serdeniuk, Dean George and Aaron Walsh due to injury and the absence of Francis Campbell and Mohammed Boudiaf leaves the squad a bit threadbare at the moment.

We have injury problems but so do most of the teams in the First Division. We can keep making excuses for various reasons but if we don't start picking up wins we will be abandoned at the bottom of the table.

By all accounts our injured players are going to be out for quite some time.  

Longford Town football club have a fantastic ground which is a tribute to many people over the years and let's hope that the current blip will only be a short term one. 

We want everyone to rally around and help the team out of this current rut. Supporters can only do so much and we hope that the team will get back to winning ways immediately. The games are coming thick and fast and we need to see some serious improvement in the coming weeks.