Kee not worried about cup draw

The Waterside man, who watched his side defeat Dergview 1-0 in Saturday’s fourth round encounter at Drumahoe, does admit that the club would love another home tie against someone like Linfield, Glentoran, Cliftonville, Coleraine or Crusaders, so that they could get some much needed revenue.

“The club would probably prefer a home draw against one of the big boys but I don’t mind if we get drawn away,” he said.

“The Irish Cup gives you the chance to go away and see how far we can go.

“If you want to go far in this competition it doesn’t matter who’s at home, you have to win the matches and on any given day, if we’re up for it, we can play a brand of football that will keep us in games.

“We have a decent intensity now in our play, we’re more physical and we’re getting better all the time and I hope that continues going into the New Year.”

The former Northern Ireland Under 17 gaffer did admit after Saturday’s cup tie that his side weren’t at their best, but they did get the job done.

“It was not one of our better performances in the last number of weeks but we won and we’re through to the next round.

“In terms of territorial play we had the vast majority of it. I can’t remember our goalkeeper having to make many saves throughout. He had a quiet day at the office.

“But we lacked a bit of edge ourselves and we spoke about that at half-time. We could maybe have scored a few more goals if we had been better in the final third, but we had another clean-sheet to boot.”

Kee was also very complementary to Tommy Canning’s men, who he knew were always going to make life difficult for his side.

“Dergview are a difficult side to play against and in fairness to them they have three or four very good players, they make the game ugly and the game was a bit scrappy as a result but the important thing was that we won.

“It wasn’t brilliant but we were efficient and effective and we’re through to the next round.

“We didn’t get going. We stood off them in the first 25 minutes; we had no tempo to our game and didn’t have the same energy levels as we had last week, which was disappointing.

“But there was more about us as a team in the second half. There was a bit of stability and solidity about us and they didn’t cause us many problems.”

The ’Stute boss also felt that Darren McCauley’s all important winning goal after the break, was probably the best piece of play throughout the 90 minutes.

“The cross was the wee bit of quality that (Neil) Harkin had, in fairness to him he got a cross in out of nothing, he has lifted it up really well to the back post and McCauley has executed it well, he has put the ball back across from where it came from.

“So fair play to Neil he has those fast feet, where he can shuffle well between his feet and he gets those passes and crosses in, but we didn’t have enough of that on Saturday.”

The Drumahoe club don’t have another game until later this month when they travel to old rivals Limavady United, on Saturday, December 29, something which disappoints Kee.

“I would rather keep the momentum going to tell the truth, the players train to play each weekend, so I would rather have a game, but we are going to play Championship Two side Sport & Leisure Swifts at Seaview on Friday night, but I’m probably going to take a young team and give some of the senior players a rest, they’ll just train this week and they’ll probably train Saturday morning as well.

“The likes of Corey Hegarty, Ricky Lee Dougherty and Sean Roddy, who are all very important players to us, will probably play on Friday night, as they need some game time.”