Preview: Linfield v Glenavon

Glenavon travel to Windsor Park tomorrow to face the reigning Champions for the first time this season. Both sides won last week, Glenavon coming from behind to defeat Ballymena United 3-1 on Saturday and Linfield notching up a 3-0 win in difficult conditions away to Carrick Rangers in Monday night’s live Sky Sports match.

Reminder: This is an all-ticket game. There are no cash turnstiles at Windsor Park.

Josh Daniels will be out for a few weeks after damaging ankle ligaments in a collision with Ballymena keeper Ross Glendinning and Sammy Clingan will not be available to face his old side as his wife is due to go into labour at any time! Jack O’Mahony also picked up an ankle knock last weekend but Gary Hamilton is hopeful that the youngster will be fit.

“We can’t assess exactly how long Josh will be out until we see the full extent of the damage after the swelling has gone down but it’s probably a minimum of four weeks,” Gary told us.

Looking ahead to the game tomorrow Gary said “Some of the guys coming back got game time with the Reserves on Wednesday. Eoin Wearen scored a couple of goals and Caolan Marron and Daniel Larmour got another match in as well. It’s good to be getting the guys back because for a while we weren’t as strong on the bench as we would have liked and we didn’t have as many options as we would have liked.

“Now we’re getting those players back there are options on the bench and competition for places and pressure on players to perform whenever they’re playing and hopefully that’ll stand us in good stead over the next few weeks. It’ll not just turn on like a tap straightaway and stay really good; it’ll take a few more weeks for everything to come together and then we can start producing a level of consistency which we were lacking at the start of the season.

“Since the trip to Scotland we’ve seen a good lift in our performances and levels of consistency. We’ve our next two games now against Linfield and Larne, probably two of the top teams in the league, but we went to Crusaders last week and put in a really good performance and played well against Ballymena, another top team, and won so hopefully the lads can go with that belief now on the back of those two performances and believe they can play well against Linfield and get a result.

“It’s a hard, hard task but we’ve seen before that nothing’s impossible now because the boys have got results at these places where maybe in the years gone by it was different. We’ve done it now at every ground where before, in my earlier years as manager of Glenavon, there was places you knew you were probably not getting a result but in the last 2-3 years we’ve proved that we can go anywhere now and that should give the lads belief.”

Robbie Garrett opened the scoring against his former side the last time the teams met, his first and so far only goal for Glenavon. 20/04/2019

Head to Head

Last ten games in all competitions

Glenavon: W4, D1 L5 F14 A12, Average goals per game = 2.6

Last five results at Windsor Park

18/04/2017: Linfield 3-0 Glenavon
20/01/2018: Linfield 2-3 Glenavon
27/02/2018: Linfield 0-2 Glenavon
22/12/2018: Linfield 0-0 Glenavon
20/04/2019: Linfield 0-4 Glenavon