Belvedere camp in winning mood despite dip in form

DESPITE a recent dip in form, there are few negative vibes in the Belvedere camp before their meeting with Bangor in hockey’s Irish Senior Cup at Ballincollig today.

The Cork side, according to club captain Ross Bateman, enjoyed their best start to a season - including a first win over Bandon in five years - but they have allowed the results to tail off over the last five weeks.

“It has been very frustrating really because the way we started this year, everyone thought it was going to be our best year ever, but our defence has been like an open wound recently and we’ve been leaking goals at a terrible rate,” Bateman says.

“We’ve been scoring loads of goals ourselves, but we cannot keep them out at the other end and while we are the third highest scoring team in the league, our defensive record is pretty dismal.

“In our last couple of matches, we’ve lost 2-1, 5-3, 4-3 and 3-2, with that last result coming against Harlequins’ first team.”

Bateman says that while the team might be displaying an element of naivete in their approach - “a bit like any Kevin Keegan team” - they are going to address the problems sooner rather than later.

“The problem is that out of a squad of 17, we probably only have 11 hockey players. Without being disrespectful to our guys, that’s the simple truth of it because we simply do not have the strength in depth that other clubs have.

“Personally, I would like to see the Munster branch going back to a situation similar to that which they imposed a couple of years ago where clubs could not have their first and second teams in the top division.

He admits to knowing little about today’s opponents but is aware of the danger posed from set pieces.

“They were promoted from Division Two last year and are now fifth in the Ulster league, so they are obviously not a push-over. But, the thing for us is not to give away short corners, because a northern side will not let opportunities like that to slip past.

“In a recent game against UCC we got eleven short corners to their four. We scored from none of them and they got two from four and won 3-2. We can’t afford to do that sort of thing in the cup.

“But generally we seem to be a good cup side and are capable of raising our game. We lost to Instonians in the cup last year, but they knew they’d had a game at the end of it.

“We’ll be looking to the likes of our fantastic veteran Jer Casey, Paul Murray and young Stephen Wolfe to do damage for us and we’ll see how we get on.”