Lochcarron Boss Andrew MacKenzie Looks Forward To The New Season. | |
15 January 2012 Lochcarron boss Andrew MacKenzie is looking forward to the 2012 shinty season. Speaking to Drew Millar on Cuillin FM’s Saturday Sports Show, MacKenzie spoke of his team’s preparation, “We have the village hall for training and we’ll have the pitch with floodlights when the weather improves. Most of the training will be in the village hall for the first three weeks anyway. We’ll then try and get the boys outside.” “We have friendlies during the whole of February this year and that should make a difference.” Player availability is always a factor and the Lochcarron boss said, “Calum Finlayson is already away to sea and Crisdean Finlayson could be joining him so they could be working away for a month at a time but although we might lose a few players this year, we should be getting a few back.” “We would like to get a settled team from the start of next season. We’ll be taking in some younger players. People will have seen young Nick Dalgety, who just turns 14 this year, playing last season and we hope to take him into the team from the start of the new season. There are a few of the older players coming back and a lot of players from last year who were just playing when needed will be training hard and available to play all next season. We only had one player who played the whole of last season and I would hope that at least half the team will do that next season.” When asked what would be a realistic finishing place in the league next season, MacKenzie replied, “We’ll hopefully finish in the top three and that is not impossible. The amount of league games has dropped this season. There could only be 12 league games so it would be a short season without a cup run and we’ll be looking for a good cup run, especially in the Balliemore. Cabers were in the final last year and we drew and beat them so hopefully we can go all the way with a fit team” “Our encashment area is Kishorn, Lochcarron and out as far as Achnasheen. We were looking at that a few weeks ago and the size of the village doesn’t always relate to the number of players who come out of it. If you look at for all the size of Achnasheen and all the Ross players who have played for us over the years, it’s remarkable.” “There are not so many very young players coming through but some of our younger players have played for Kinlochshiel at youth level and we hope there will be a few this coming season. University shinty is going well too and boys like Ben Dalgety and Finlay Stark have been playing throughout the winter.” |