‘Experience tells me we can catch up’

GARY Rogers knows better than most that a winning run at the end of the season is more important that one at the start.

The Dundalk goalkeeper was helpless to prevent his side falling nine points off early pacesetters Cork City on Friday night as two controversial penalties were both converted by Gary McCabe and Bray Wanderers ran out 3-1 winners at Oriel Park.

That defeat leaves Stephen Kenny’s side facing a huge uphill struggle to claim their fourth league title in-a-row and while Rogers insists that his side cannot afford to drop many more points, he knows only too well that Cork’s record of nine wins from nine could count for very little in the long run.

That’s because the 35-year-old was part of a Sligo Rovers team in 2013 who looked equally unbeatable, having opened their season with eight wins from eight.

They ended up finishing third, however, despite having the experience of a title-winning campaign 12 months earlier.

That’s experience that this Cork City side don’t have and while Rogers admits that John Caulfield’s team will take some catching, he is confident Dundalk have what it takes to do just that over the course of the remaining 24 matches.

‘We can’t afford to fall any further behind,’ Rogers told The Argus after Friday’s defeat.

‘Nine points is a fair gap. Obviously it’s up to us to roll our sleeves up and get a run of games to shorten that gap but it’s going to take time to claw it back but we have to do that. ‘Every game now is massive,’ he said. Reflecting on his Sligo experience from four years ago, Rogers said that he’d rather be on a winning run at the end of the season than at the start.

‘For us that time we had a couple of poor results in and around European time where we drew three or four games and allowed teams to catch up.

‘A winning run is good but it means nothing now. If you go on a run of eight wins at the end of the season that can get you back into the mix. The hardest thing is always to get over the finish line.

‘We’ll just go about our business, work hard and try to claw back that gap. You never know, going into the last round of games if we can be there or thereabouts then this group has that mental strength to go and win leagues. We just have to get ourselves back into the position where we’re able to do that.’

Rogers has rarely, if ever, faced two penalties in the same game outside of a shoot-out and admitted he couldn’t believe it that he had to do so against Bray on Friday.

‘I didn’t think either of them were penalties,’ he said.

‘I haven’t had the luxury of seeing them back, but I’d be 100% sure the second one was definitely not a penalty and the first one was very dubious. Their man was going nowhere and no way Stephen (O’Donnell) is going to foul him there, but he just played the ref.

‘We reacted well to the first one but the second one was just a sucker punch. There was absolutely no danger and none of our boys were fouling, but it was just a bad decision. We just have to suck that up and get on with it.

‘It’s a frustrating night. I certainly don’t think we were 3-1 worse off in the game, but that’s the way it has turned out. We just have to have a good week’s training and get ourselves going again for next week,’ said Rogers.