TIERNAN LYNCH: STRENGTH OF LEAGUE HELPED FUEL LARNE'S TITLE FIRE
Tiernan Lynch hailed the strength of the Irish Premiership for helping inspire his Larne side to creating more history.
The champions-elect are on the verge of back-to-back titles becoming the first provincial club to do so since Portadown at the start of the 1990s. It's a fantastic achievement for the Invermen but Lynch was quick to point out they were nearly out of the title race in November before turning things around after another memorable night at Windsor Park.
"It shows the strength of the league when you see how hard we've had to push," he said. "We played Linfield at Windsor back in November and if we had lost we would have been 11 points behind them and it probably would have been curtains for us if truth be told.
"I thought we were magnificent on the night, the total opposite of what we were on Monday night. That set us up and we went on a run which saw us beat Linfield, Cliftonville, Glentoran and Coleraine and clawed back the deficit.
"That gave us the confidence to go on and try and push for this. It has been tough...there are so many good teams, managers and you definitely have that target on your back.
"I’ve said on a number of occasions that I’ve gone to numerous games midweek for the team you’re playing on a Saturday and they just played totally differently against us. Linfield have been facing that for years and had to overcome it, so we had to learn to overcome that and, thankfully, on most occasions we did.”
While mathematically Larne can still be caught realistically it's unlikely even if they were to fall to defeat at home to Coleraine this evening given their huge goal difference. Reflecting back on the success they've had over the past seven years Lynch admitted with consecutive titles was something they had never even contemplated.
"No, we probably didn’t envisage back-to-back – we always envisaged having a crack at winning the league,” he said. “Our goal was to make sure we won a league title and see if we could build on that.
"Potentially doing it back-to-back was something we didn’t give a huge amount of consideration to. We talked a lot about wanting a seat at the top table and a team that would always be around challenging, but if we can win back-to-back it would be a hell of an achievement and great credit has to go to the football club and everyone involved.
"It certainly hasn't been easy, there has been a lot of blood, sweat and tears along the way so Saturday will be a very special day if we can make it happen."
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2024-04-26T21:20:19Z dg43tfdfdgfd