Crunch time for Hermes' league title aspirations

HERMES have shown enough potential this season to suggest their captain Helen Kilroy will have a victory speech or two to make before the middle of March.

Now a crucial spell of three league games and two cup semifinals - in the space of three weeks - will tell everyone, including themselves, whether or not the team has the ability to translate that potential into silverware.

They don't come much bigger than test number one, a crunch meeting with Muckross in the league tomorrow afternoon. Victory in this classic six-pointer would put Hermes within a point of the unbeaten defending champions and league leaders with a game in hand - defeat would leave them seven points adrift.

Kilroy insists her "troops are up for it" and are in no doubt about the importance of the match for the club's title aspirations. "A win would make the league a possibility for us - a defeat would leave us relying on other teams to do us a favour and we want to avoid that. We want to be the first team to beat them this season so we'll have a go at them, we certainly won't be playing for a draw."

Kilroy has been at the centre of one of the league's tightest defences this season. Since conceding five goals in the first three matches Hermes goalkeeper Tara Browne has kept six blank sheets, with the help of Roly Burke, Sinead McDonnell, Aggie Taylor.

Muckross, on the other hand, have scored 35 goals in just 10 league games, including 14 from Mary Logue who has been on the score-sheet in every league game so far this season. Something, it would seem, has to give tomorrow.

"Only four dropped points and six wins in our last six games - you would think we should be leading the league with a record like that but that's how difficult it is to win it. We've been playing well, we're in the semi-finals of both cups, but then so are Muckross. It would be terrible if in eight weeks' time we were sitting here saying `what if'. We were in the same position last season but lost in the last four of both cups so there is a very strong desire to win something this year anything, I don't mind what,"

says Kilroy.

Another of the league contenders, third-placed Old Alexandra, are on cup duty again this weekend when they travel to Belfast to replay their Sharwood's Irish Senior C up semi-final against Pegasus. The holders will be favourites now that they have home advantage but Old Alexandra's performance against them in Dublin will give them some hope of reaching the semi-finals where the winners will play Hermes.