Davy Dorrian wants his young guns to show fans what they’re made of when Linfield Swifts take on Newington in the Toals Steel & Sons Cup final on Wednesday morning.
It’s the second time in three years the two teams have faced each other in the festive Seaview showpiece after the Ton denied the Wee Blues to clinch a first ever win in the venerated 125-year-old competition on Christmas Day 2017.
Back then, Dorrian’s men came into the tie strongly fancied following a barnstorming run to the final, with the sides which stood in their way demolished six and seven.
But the occasion appears to have overwhelmed that generation, with the final a scrappy affair which was eventually decided by Padraig Scollay’s late strike.
“To be fair to Newington, if I was playing against my team, I’d be thinking, they are a bunch of young lads, I have to stop them playing, and that’s just football, there are different ways to win football matches,” said Dorrian.
“I didn’t think it was a very good game, the last one on Christmas morning, we played very well in the quarter-finals and semi-finals, scored a lot of goals, but a few things conspired against us that day.
“The first team were playing Glentoran on Boxing Day, as they will again this year, and Ross Clarke and Stevie Fallon, who had been standout performers the whole way through, weren’t available on Christmas morning because they were needed on Boxing Day.
“So that’s all part of it as well, but it does make it hard.”
Normally, managers could use that kind of cup final heartache as a team-talk, reminding his players how they felt and why they don’t want to go there again.
But the very nature of the Swifts, a development side after all, means that the XI who take to the field in the morning will bear little resemblance to the one that crashed 24 months ago.
What significance all this has remains to be seen, but Dorrian insists that regardless of what went before, his current Swifts team has ability in abundance and more than enough talent to add to their haul of 10 Steel Cups.
“We’re still very young, we’ve actually got I think three who played in the final before, Ruairi O’Hare would be one, and he’s 18 now, so it gives you an idea of the age of our teams,” he said.
“Now I have got two 15-year-olds and a 16-year-old in the squad. I got some bad news that one of our lads broke his leg in training (Justin Devlin), he would have been part of the squad on cup final day.
“So we’re a development team and all year, you preach to them to play football and the result isn’t the most important thing, but when you come to play in a cup competition, the result is everything, so this is different for us.
“But we have a lot of young, quality players, a lot of them are international footballers, and they get a lot of good press, and they’ve big futures ahead of them so hopefully they do come up well for us and show everybody that we are a good football team and we can play good football.
“We have six or seven players knocking pn the door and maybe one or two are looking to go even higher than Irish League, they’ve been across to England and Scotland for trials. Ultimately, we want them to be Linfield players but sometimes there’s a bigger picture as well.”
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