‘We can rise to the occasion’

JOHN Mountney has experienced enough must win games at his time at Dundalk to know that his side generally rise to the occasion when they come around.

Now the Mayo man is backing his side to do just that when they travel to Israel next week.

While a score draw against Maccabi Tel Aviv in Netanya could potentially take Dundalk through to the latter stages of the Europa League, Mountney insists his side will treat it as a must win and hope that Zenit St Petersburg can do them a favour in the other Group D game against AZ in Holland.

‘We have to go out there and beat them to qualify,’ said the 23-year-old.

‘It will be a quick turnaround now over the next two weeks and we’ll try to go out there to try and get a positive result.

‘A draw might do but our mindset will be just to get the win to make sure,’ he said.

The midfielder, who came on just before half-time for injured skipper Stephen O’Donnell, admitted Thursday’s defeat to AZ was a blow.

‘I think our attitude coming into the game was to try and get a result but unfortunately we didn’t.

‘We had a slow start. I think it took us 20 or 25 minutes to get going. I don’t know what that was down to but when we did get going then we really applied ourselves.

‘Gary made a few good saves but apart from that we had a lot of pressure and a couple of chances.

‘Stevie was a big loss when he came off. He’s our captain and our leader and a brilliant player so it’s never good to see him come off the pitch but we’ve a big squad and if someone does get injured we’d like to think we have players coming in that can do a job.’

Mountney is hopeful now that Dundalk won’t be as poor again when they take to the field in Netanya.

‘We’ll have two weeks of good training and get ourselves ready for it.

‘At least we know what we have to do out there. So far in any one on one clash that we needed to win we’ve done well so our mindset will be positive and we’ll be going out there to try and get the job done,’ he said.