Fresh start for St Ledger

EMMET MALONEfinds the defender in more buoyant mood after a difficult season last year

IT MAY not have been the best start to the new campaign for Seán St Ledger or Preston North End, but, after last year, one suspects, it would need to get a whole lot worse before the 25-year-old defender even starts to contemplate complaining.

Having only just established himself in the Irish set-up, St Ledger was regarded as a fairly hot property 12 months ago with Celtic and a number of top-flight clubs loosely linked with a move for him before he eventually went to Middlesbrough in a convoluted deal that would eventually go badly wrong.

He returned somewhat chastened by the experience to Deepdale, where a loss of form sparked a loss of confidence, and an injury-accelerated downward spiral ensued until the start of the summer when he arrived into Dublin for the friendly games against Paraguay and Algeria looking a little battered by the strain of it all and in urgent need of a break.

This week, he was back looking fairly fit and a good deal happier with his lot. Of course, there is the small matter of Preston having taken just three points in the league so far, but the season is young, he is almost fully fit again and there is every reason to believe that he is about receive a major vote of confidence from Giovanni Trapattoni when the Ireland team for Friday’s game against Armenia in Yerevan is named.

“Yeah, I feel pretty refreshed now,” he says with a clear sense of relief. “I had a break and I think I needed it.”

There is still a slight problem with his hamstring, picked up during what seemed at the time a fairly promising pre-season for Preston, but, critically, the knee injury that plagued him last year has been resolved, as has the hernia that routinely left him to play through the pain.

He even seems happy that vague talk of a renewed interest by Celtic has come to nothing, determined perhaps to avoid a repeat of the distractions and disappointments of last season.

On the international front, of course, there was a good deal for St Ledger to cheer with the defender quickly becoming a fixture in Trapattoni’s back four where he struck up an impressive understanding with Richard Dunne.

Ultimately, though, that night in Paris ensured that his first international campaign ended on a sour note and he is anxious to ensure that his second builds to a rather more joyful conclusion even if the quality of the opposition this time around is a little more difficult to gauge.

“I think if we can reproduce the form that we showed in the last campaign then we’ve got a hell of a chance of qualifying,” he says. “Some of the other teams are unknown quantities really but obviously we have to prepare properly.

“We’ll do all the work this week to make sure that we know all about them. At the moment it’s hard because the players aren’t playing in the major leagues. That makes it a bit more difficult.

“When you’re playing in, say, Italy, you know what the players are all about. Obviously some players have got particular traits, some tricks that they do and sometimes you can read what they’re going to do. Then you can go somewhere like Armenia and you don’t know what the striker’s going to do, it’s kind of hard to get the information on them sometimes. I’ll do my best obviously to do my research on the players and watch the video clips of the players. It can be hard sometimes, but if I can get a heads up on them then that’s great.”

He is wary of making firm predictions about how the next few days will go and says that he has heard the Armenians have a decent, up-and-coming team that contains some good young players.

“It’s going to be a tough game,” he says. “They’ve got a lot of energy in the team but we’ll match that. We’ll be able to match it, I’m sure. These are two winnable games. It won’t be easy, we know that but hopefully we’ll come away with the three points.”