Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
EAST COMING ON STRONG AFTER HURT
Ryan focused on promotion drive
RYAN Davison says East Belfast intend to keep their heads down as they plot a longawaited return to the Amateur League’s top flight.
The Sydenham outfit currently sit in third place in the 1A standings, some 10 points off long time league leaders 1st Bangor, but with four games in hand over TJ Young’s side.
Stephen Matthews’ men, who ended their 53-year wait for the Border
Cup last season, missed out on promotion by a whisker last year, crashing
4-3 in a winnertakes-all end-ofseason thriller at
Lisburn Rangers.
Naturally,
Davison and his team-mates were inconsolable after the defeat, but he says it just makes them doubly determined to set the record straight this time round as the East go in search of a first Premier Division campaign in more than a decade.
“We’re feeling good about how things are going, we’re playing some 31.01.2017 good football so we’re buzzing,” said Davison (below).
“We’re just taking one game at a time, we’re not thinking about promotions or titles or looking towards the end of the season at all, we’re just looking at the next game.
“Obviously it would be a nice thing to get promoted or to win the league but there are some good teams there in the league.” Speaking to Match On Tuesday a few weeks back, 1st Bangor striker Ryan Harvey suggested the only teams the league leaders feared were the East and Comber, and Davison tends to agree, with the 31-year-old envisaging a three-way battle for the top two spots over the weeks and months ahead.
“Yeah. That’s probably the way I would be looking at it too,” said Davison.
“If you look at the table with games in hand, that’s the way I see it too and when you look at it, we’ve still to play Comber twice and 1st Bangor once, they will be big games and they are the games we obviously need to pick up points in.
“But our focus is just on the next game, we don’t want to get too carried away after last year.
“A lot of us were down after we didn’t get promoted because we had such a good season last year after winning the Border Cup and it came down to the last game.
“It made us like a wounded animal and I think we are all trying to make amends, we don’t want that feeling again.
“We need to just keep winning our games and not worry about any of the teams around us.”
Should they complete the job, the East will have to do it without the efforts of injured winger Warren Pinkerton who will be out for the rest of the season, but Davison insists that is the beauty of having a big squad with Stephen Garrett a more than able deputy.
“We lost wee Shorty (Pinkerton), he broke his leg so he’s going to be a big loss,” said Davison.
“But we have players there to come in who can do a job, wee Onions (Garrett) has been out a while now but he’s ready to come back in for us.”