Two games left to go for the Blues and all eyes are on the lower half of the table where Marc Bircham's team and Finn Harps are still locked in a battle for 8th spot.
With some context, this position could be an awful lot worse if a change hadn't been made earlier in the year when the team was at a complete rock bottom.
Nonetheless, the team finds themselves in a battle to avoid a relegation play-off. One thing that would make life a bit more tolerable for the Blues is a nice three-point take-away from Longford this weekend.
Bircham's Blues, and Ollie Horgan's Harps are still tied on 40 points a piece, with Harps goal difference enough to keep them just a nose ahead.
The already-relegated Longford host Waterford this Saturday with the away team suffering a disappointing 3-1 loss to Shamrock Rover's at the RSC last Friday. After that result, Marc Bircham was left to chew on his team's efforts, and by the time he was done ruminating - his stress levels were at a new high. Defender Kyle Ferguson watched on from the stands as the league champions ran riot at the Regional Sports Centre where set-pieces again undid the early efforts of John Martin in front of goal.
He's got every right not to be happy. The last-minute goal against Derry wasn't good enough. We'd worked on set pieces and we conceded two set-pieces against Shamrock Rovers which ultimately cost us the game. So he's well within his rights to be angry with us and I think the players as well were just as angry as him. But obviously, no one could see that. Definitely, it's something we need to work on going into these last two games that were positive on set pieces and we score more than we concede.
While Shamrock Rovers provide a certain challenge - a challenge of a very different kind will be offered by Longford. The team have known their fate for some time now, and they will be destined for the first division next season when games return. While it might be easy to dismiss the Bishopsgate side as providing no great challenge, Glaswegian Ferguson points out where the danger lies.
These boys are ultimately playing for a contract for next season. I don't think they will have any lack of motivation. We've looked at what the strengths and what the weaknesses are and we'll try and expose the weaknesses and nullify their strengths as much as we can but like I said, they've got a free hit. They've got nothing to lose so it's one of the games where it could go either way, but we will make sure that we're on top and we will get three points 100%.
180 minutes of football are all that's left for the Blues in the regular season. That's not a lot of time to salvage a year that could have easily been a lot worse. Asked by WLR Sport if the challenge they now face has put any greater pressure on their shoulders, Ferguson says that in the end of the day, the game is not unlike any other game when it comes to the preparation.
We've been dealing with pressure probably for the last two months now because we know how close we are to getting to safety. Every game you play with pressure; especially in this league every game is a hard game but definitely, there's added pressure but it's nothing that we haven't had before like this group of boys have played in these big games all season. This is just another one that we need to pick up three points from.
