'No doubt the goals will come' - Derry's Tiernan Lynch
Danny Mullen returns from suspension for the visit of league leaders Drogheda United
Danny Mullen returns from suspension for the visit of league leaders Drogheda United tomorrow night, with Derry City's strikers hoping to finally get off and running this season.
Eight games into the season, City’s forward line have yet to get firing, with Pat Hoban’s penalty against Waterford the only return from the strikers as yet.
In Mullen’s case, he has been entirely short of luck, having missed games through injury, then suffering a controversial red card on his first start of the season at Shamrock Rovers. The 30-year-old striker gets a second chance to start his season again tomorrow night with City hoping to close in on the league leaders and Tiarnan Lynch has no doubt his front line will come good.
“With Danny, like everyone, all you can do is put it in front of them,” he said. “With the work that they’re putting in everyday, they deserve a lot more than they’re getting right now, but they just have to stay strong and stay focused and we have absolutely no doubt in our minds that those goals will start flying in.”
Liam Boyce celebrated his 34th birthday earlier this week, and after a strong performance against Cork last week, there would be no better birthday gift than his first Derry City goal.
“Great credit to Boycie, you find a lot of strikers get themselves in that situation and they snap at things and they start trying to be more selfish and do anything just to get that goal, and that’s not his form,” Lynch continued. “He’s an experienced pro who has played international football and who’s played at the highest level and he knows that with the quality he has somewhere along the line, something is going into the net and when that happens, I hope and pray he just takes off from there.”
City can move to within just one point of Kevin Doherty’s side with a victory as they look to stretch their unbeaten run to five games.
“It’s a difficult game obviously because Drogheda are league leaders and they have had a phenomenal start to the season, scoring goals and not conceding goals which is always a good recipe,” Lynch said. “We know it’s going to be an extremely difficult game. They are a tough team to play against. We’ve now watched a lot of them and they have a very specific brand which is working for them right now and fair play to them, but our job is to go in there with then things that we have been doing well in the last couple of weeks and hopefully try to impose our game on them.”
One area that Lynch definitely wants an improvement in is in defence, with City falling behind five times in just eight games so far.
“We don’t want to concede any goals,” he emphasised. “We have a clean sheet club that needs to get kicking into gear. We’ve had good incident and bad incidents. When we watch all our games back and the goals we’ve conceded back and we break them down, any goals preventable. And we’ve conceded some really stupid goals which we’ve been really disappointed in. Getting into the box and scoring goals, you can’t fault the players because they are working really hard at it, and there’s a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes to make sure we stop conceding goals and give ourselves that platform.”
Lynch’s first experience of League of Ireland football has been hampered by disciplinary issues with three red cards and 24 yellow cards to date, but he doesn’t feel he has to warn his plyers to tread carefully despite his team suffering from some controversial dismissals.
“I think a lot of the yellow cards have been harsh on us also,” he stated. “The only time that you can really get annoyed at a player or pull a player for a yellow card or a red card is if it’s for something stupid like dissent and it was needless, but I can never have a go at a player for a tackle or a referee’s decision or anything like that.
"This is a committed bunch and they wear their hearts on their sleeves and one of the big things we’re really trying to implement here is creating that winning culture and what it means to pull that shirt over your head so I can’t talk to them day in and day out about giving everything they have and then talk to them about being careful in how they tackle or how they defend or how they go and win the ball, and that’s just something we have to deal with.”