Editorial: Can City save their season?

It’s a huge week for soccer in Cork with the FAI Cup Final taking place on Sunday in Dublin.

First though is the Under-17 World Cup in Qatar. The Republic of Ireland have never been to be a FIFA World Cup at that age grade so it’s pretty exciting. The manager is ex-Cork City man Colin O’Brien whose side faced Panama in their opener yesterday. It was on tv and so will the following Group J games against Uzbekistan and Paraguay. Hopefully Ireland will progress and they boast some very good players including Shamrock Rovers striker Michael Noonan who has scored in Europe and for the Irish U21s already.

Another prominent player is Corkman and Benfica forward Jaden Umeh meaning Ireland have strong forward options. One striking thing is the large amount of players in the squad who have come through a League of Ireland club or are still playing for and many of those players have seen some competitive adult action this season.

Raf Diallo did some great analysis for RTÉ and found that 14 of them have played at least one minute of senior club football this season. The Irish team have 13,392 career minutes collectively this season, which compares more than favourably to the ten other European teams in Qatar this month. Good luck lads!

Depsite the presence of Cork City’s Brody Lee in the U17 squad, the focus on Leeside is on the FAI Cup Final on Sunday at 3pm.

Cork City has a much stronger recent cup pedigree than Shamrock Rovers and the recent spike in FAI Cup attendances was kick-started by Cork City’s epic tussles with Dundalk from 2015 to 2018.

Now City face the all-conquering Shamrock Rovers who finally won the league recently.

The good news is that Shamrock Rovers’ form has declined hugely recently - partly due to almost having had the league won weeks ago. Shamrock Rovers also face AEK Athens in Greece tonight in the Europa Conference League which will be a big focus for them.

Since their FAI Cup semi-final win over Kerry, they’ve lost 5 of 6 games and only one of those was in Europe.

Shamrock Rovers haven’t won the cup since 2019 - which is remarkable given they’ve won five league titles in six seasons. Before that the last Rovers’ win was 1987 - very surprising.

However Cork City has not had a win away from home all season and conceded a lot of goals to boot. We last won a league game in August, against second from bottom Waterford.

Cork City drew 1-1 with Rovers in the league back in September too. Having said that, Cork’s last win was the outstanding semi-final win over an out-of-sorts St Patrick’s Athletic in Cork on 3 October. Since then, City have had 3 narrow losses and a draw away to Sligo Rovers.

Big pluses are the return of striker Ruairí Keating and experienced midfielder Greg Bolger. Any team with Seani Maguire has a chance too.

City have 2 draws and 2 losses against Rovers this season - let’s see if they can do something special this Sunday. Come on City!