John Mountney a major doubt for Dundalk’s clash with Zenit

John Mountney is one of several doubts for manager Stephen Kenny as he weighs up what starting XI to go with for Dundalk's third Europa League group game, against Zenit St Petersburg on Thursday evening.

"Stephen O'Donnell is ruled out and John Mountney, with a hamstring problem, is a big doubt," said the Dubliner at his pre-match press conference. "We have four or five on the doubtful list (Sean Gannon, David McMillan and Chris Shields are amongst the others) at the moment and a few will be absent from training today but everyone wants to play and our physios are working flat out with them at the moment.

“We’re in a good position,” he said. “We’ve four points from the two games. It’s great for us to be playing in the Europa League, it’s very unusual for an Irish team to be in this position at the end of the season. But we know that Zenit have a great tradition. They’ve won the competition, which would be a standout moment in their history, and we do respect that achievement but this has been a tremendous journey for our players and we relish occasions and challenges like tomorrow night.”

Kenny noted, once again, that his players have had little opportunity to prepare for these particular opponents having been preoccupied again until Monday night with the the defence of their league title but he is hopeful that the squad will again rise to the occasion as they have repeatedly done over the course of the last few months and look to make a major impact on the proceedings.

“I think we’ve never really had that problem,” he says. “We respect our opponents but we believe in what we are doing ourselves and that won’t change tomorrow. We realise that there will be spells where we will under pressure and Zenit will show their quality but we have to ride out those times and create our own opportunities. That’s what we will try to do tomorrow.”