Gary Hamilton is still hampered by a lengthy injury list but he is able to recall Eoin Bradley back to the starting line-up for the visit of Glentoran. The striker missed Wednesday night’s League Cup victory over Cliftonville with a sore Achilles.

“It’s pretty much the way we were the other night in terms of the squad, with the addition of Eoin,” Gary told us as he looked ahead to tomorrow’s game. “The boys were excellent against Cliftonville, they put in a good shift and I thought their fitness levels proved that they’re as fit as any team in the league. If you look at the Crusaders game as well, against the top team in the league, they kept going until the 94th minute and we were the fitter team, with ten men, and still breaking away and getting a penalty kick. The last two home performances have, apart from Ballymena, been as good as there’s been this season.

“We work a lot in training on pressing the ball and we did that really well against Crusaders, Ards and Cliftonville – the pressing was very, very good all over the pitch. The two young kids (Mark Sykes and Rhys Marshall) who are 19 and 21 years of age, playing against the three of Cliftonville who are top players, and to dominate three, is really good and really pleasing. They did it for 120 minutes but the difficult thing for us is now, because we can’t make too many changes to freshen it up. It’ll only be really three days from the game, with two days rest and they’re in working, you don’t get a good sleep after a Wednesday night game with the adrenalin in you and they probably had a hard days work yesterday. That’ll be the concern that our energy and fitness levels will stand up to it as we had such a tough 120 minutes on Wednesday.”

Gary Haveron’s appointment as manager at The Oval has seen the Glens results improve and he was voted Manager of the Month for October with three wins and two draws in the last six games. Glenavon has lost only once in the last 12 games.

“It’ll be a tough game. The new manager’s come in and he’s obviously got new ideas and he’s got them playing a different way and the results have improved but our lads are playing with confidence as well and if we can perform like we did the other night there’ll be very few teams in this league that will beat us so hopefully it’ll be more of the same tomorrow,” Gary concluded.