Athlone Town vs Wexford Youths

• Gareth Penrose
• Sat, Nov 01 2008




Wexford Youths travel to Athlone Town on Saturday in the hope they can leapfrog Longford Town into 7th place, after the midfielders found themselves on the wrong end of a 5-1 defeat to Monaghan on Friday.

The task will a tough one for Mick Wallace’s men as they will be without several key first team players. Patsy Malone will serve his second of a two game ban, while Conor Sinnot picked up a knock in training that will keep him out and top scorer Danny Furlong and his strike partner Paul Murphy are out for the rest of the season.

The club have three games this weekend with an under-18 clash on Saturday morning, the Athlone clash that evening and the U20's are in action against Cobh at Ferrycarrig Park on Sunday and Wallace's squad is stretched.

"I had five under-18's playing last week against Monaghan, but none of them will feature for the seniors this week as I'll be using them for the under-18 game Saturday morning," Wallace said.

"With four key players missing we will be really stretched numbers wise, so a difficult trip to Athlone will be even tougher now. The under-18's are paramount to the club and the ethos it is built on, so they always get priority.

"The majority of the side that faces Athlone for the seniors will be used again the following day against Cobh. It's tough at this stage of the season but there's little we can do as the under-20 fixture schedule has left a lot to be desired.

"We're ahead of Athlone in the table and it would be nice to pick up a win on Saturday and keep it that way until the end of the season."

After Tuesday night’s disappointing display against Sporting Fingal, Athlone manager Dermot Lennon will be looking for the players to produce a much better performance on the pitch.

Lennon will have to plan without the long term injured Niall Scullion (ankle) who is definitely unavailable while Nigel Keady (ankle) and Jim Sheridan (calf) are both struggling with niggling injuries and are considered very doubtful.

The game kicks off at 19:30.

Extratime Prediction: A tough one to call, so we are going to sit on the fence with this one and call a draw, 1-1.