Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
MAKE MINE A DOUBLE..
Cockcroft wants the East to add Clarence to their memorable Steel & Sons success
STEPHEN COCKCROFT has challenged his East Belfast teammates to round off the season in style by riding off into the sunset with a Clarence and Steel Cup double.
The Premier Division runners-up lock horns with Rosemount at Comber Rec’s Park Way home tomorrow night (7.45pm) looking to add the trophy to the Steel Cup they landed on Christmas Day.
Fresh from Rosebowl duty where he picked up the man of the match award, the 25-year-old winger reckons the shorter sprints of the cups rather than the marathon of a league campaign have brought out the best of his team this season.
In the league, he concedes they always feared they were never really masters of their own destiny with an imperious Crumlin Star never looking likely to slip up, but in the knockout competitions it’s a different story, with the East seizing upon their chance to swell the trophy cabinet.
“I think it’s just down to grit and determination,” said Cockcroft of the East’s form in the cups.
“We got to the stage in the league where you have your doubts about if you are going to win it but you just keep going and going and hope teams take points off the likes of the Star.
“But in the cups you go in just wanting to win because the longer you win the longer your season goes on because it can go in very quickly, and we’ve been playing Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday because of our cup runs, so it’s nice to keep the season going on as long as possible.
“And everyone likes to win trophies, if you come to the end of the season and you haven’t won any trophies, then you haven’t had a good season and it will be nice to look back on your career and see the trophies and the medals that you have won.”
While they were beaten to first place in the league by Star, the East were the most prolific team in the top flight, top scoring with 89 goals from 26 games.
And the addition of Cockcroft midway through last season, and Danny Mckee six months before that, has been transformative in pairing together the deadliest duo in the Amateur League.
“Going forward, we’ve been absolutely brilliant. Dan has hit 61 goals there, I’ve chipped in with about 20 myself and there are a lot of other people chipping in, we have defenders scoring and midfielders scoring, so everyone is doing their bit,” said Cockcroft.
“And this last wee while, we haven’t conceded too many. Obviously we still concede the odd sloppy goal, that happens in football, but we’ve certainly tightened up defensively and we’ve improved the amount of goals that we have scored.” The East missed out on the title as a rampant Star wrapped up three in a row in the East’s own backyard a fortnight ago.
But Cockcroft insists there is no sense of despondency around the club with the Steel Cup already in the bag and a cup double within touching distance.
“No certainly not,” said the former Crusaders man. “Over the last six or seven games, we’ve only been beaten once so there’s a lot of positives to take from it. Everybody is back fit and there’s plenty of competition for places so that’s good too.
“It’s not nice going into big games if you are short of players or if you are on a bad run, especially if you are going into a cup final, so to do a double, for East Belfast and everybody at the club, it would be tremendous.”
As for the challenge posed by Rosemount, Cockcroft has promised the East will learn from the last time they played when the 1C outfit stunned them in the quarter-finals of the Border Cup.
“They beat us 1-0 and I don’t think there’s any doubt that we underestimated them,” said Cockcroft.
“But we’re going to prepare for this game a lot more. We’ve had a couple of training sessions and we know what way we want to play and it has the prospect of being a really exciting game, but we’re hoping to learn from the last game and put our flaws right this time.”