National League champions St Patrick's Athletic have confirmed details of their pre-season friendly programme with St Johnstone, Watford and Nottingham Forest all coming to Inchicore to take part in the fifth annual Cablelink-sponsored festival.
The match against Scottish Premier Division side St Johnstone tomorrow evening will be the Dublin club's final outing before next Wednesday's Champions' League qualifier against FSC Zimbru Chisinau and manager Liam Buckley admits that the teams involved in the two games will have a fairly familiar look about them.
"Our preparations so far have been good but we'll be more or less looking to give the players that will be involved next week a chance to have a run out together," said Buckley yesterday.
It will be interesting, therefore, to see how Buckley deploys his four summer signings tomorrow. One of the new arrivals, Marcus Hallows, who joined from Sligo Rovers last month, looks likely to start up front but it isn't clear yet how difficult Dessie Byrne, Shane Harte or Aaron Callaghan (signed from Stockport, Sunderland and Crusaders respectively) will find it to establish themselves in Buckley's first-team plans.
So far all have done well and whatever happens in the European games there will be further opportunities to impress when Nottingham Forest play at Richmond Park on July 17th and Premiership newcomers Watford fly in for their game on the last day of the month.
Buckley said he was satisfied that sufficient information has been compiled on Wednesday's Moldovan opponents to enable him to prepare his side properly for the game.
"We've come a long way given that a couple of weeks ago we really didn't know anything at all about them. We got a good bit of information from the internet and from tracking down people who knew something about them. We also have a video of one of their European games from last season which I'm hoping to get the lads in to watch over the next day or so."
