Ballinamallard manager Gavin Dykes admits that they have been eyeing this Saturday’s home game against a struggling Portadown for a couple of weeks as they look to keep distance between themselves and the bottom of the table.
Dykes has had to manage his squad and has shipped heavy defeats to Dungannon in the cup and Linfield in the league but he readily admits that the priority for his side is the Ports game.
“We prioritise games that it is important to take points out of and when we sat down and looked the games. We thought we would get something out of Glentoran which we did and I decided to try and mix it up against Dungannon and it didn’t go to plan and we went to Linfield and it was always going to be a big ask. We were sort of always gearing towards Portadown game for maybe two weeks so hopefully that may pay off for us and then we have a tough game in Ballymena and then a huge game against Carrick. You have to sort of pick your games in the league that you can win, you have to be a realist,” he said.
Portadown sit bottom of the Premiership having had a 12 point penalty upheld last week while manager Pat McGibbon has stepped down from the position with club legend Vinny Arkins in temporary charge. Dykes expects Arkins to get a reaction from his players.
“I know Vinny quite well, I’ve had many a battle with him and he will get a reaction from them but what’s going on a Portadown is none of our concern, we can only look after ourselves. They beat us 2-1 in the second game of the season so we know they are going to be good side and we are going to have to play well but hopefully if we get a good performance it will be enough for us.”

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As far as Dykes is concerned, the goal for the Mallards this season is simple.
“I make no apology for it, our bread and butter is to try and stay in the Premier League, that’s the aim,” he said.
“Where we are at the moment, if  the league finished now we would be delighted and it would give us a chance to build for next year. The challenge is to stay ahead of the bottom two and stay ahead of Glentoran if we can,” commented Dykes.
The manager has had injury problems this week though including a bad knock to captain James McKenna although he hopes it is not as bad as first expected.
“I’m hoping it’s not season ending. When I saw him going off on the stretcher and I talked to the physio it didn’t look good but the prognosis is not as bad as we thought,” he added. “We’ve been unfortunate with impact injuries but hopefully we will have Shane McCabe back for this week.”
Errors proved costly for the Mallards on Saturday but as Dykes has said time and again, he will have to accept that with young defenders.
“I thought collectively we played quite well to be honest and we created some chances but we made individual mistakes and it cost us. As I’ve said all along, when you have such a young team and such a young back four they are going to make mistakes and you just have to learn from it and get over it.”

They are in a different league to us, that’s the way it is. They have a lot more experienced players than us. We gave Callum Frempong his debut and he was excellent and we had to put on young Niall Owens and again he was outstanding and he has done really well for a 16 year old kid. I felt sorry for him because he left a back pass short but he has been very good for us.

We have managed every one really well but we’ve been unfortunate with impact injuries. We lost Davy Elliott and we lost Ryan Morris and we lost James McKenna as well.