Tickets remain on sale for Friday’s match in Tallaght Stadium. Kick-off at 8pm. The match will be shown on LOITV.

It was another disappointing derby defeat on Monday night, losing 2-0 to Bohemians at Dalymount Park. Have you been able to identify what in particular went wrong or put your finger on our first half performance?

“There are a few things that went wrong, that’s clear to see. It’s our job as a staff to understand that and try to understand why that happened, because the players have been excellent for long periods of this season. So for us, as a staff, we’ve got to try and look at and understand why that was. We’ve obviously reviewed the game and we know why, so we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s unfortunate it’s in that type of game that it’s happened, but it did and we got punished.”

Everyone, players, staff and fans are hurting after the manner of the defeat. How important is it to try and take the emotion out of it and analyse calmly and logically what went wrong and learn from that?

“I think we’re all very emotional after the game and for a day or so afterwards, that’s quite normal. If you’re not emotional, I don’t think you care about it. We all care, everyone connected with the club cares, when we lose any game, but especially a Dublin derby. So then it’s our job to take that emotion out of it as time goes on and really try to understand what happened. It’s not all on individuals or players, it’s us as a group. So as a staff, it’s our responsibility to recognise what happened and put that right. You can only do that if you take the emotion out of it. It’s something I feel we’re good at here, as a team, as a squad and, as a club. So it’s something we’ve done and we’ve recognised what went wrong.”

With the front-loaded season, we’ve already another game on Friday, is that a positive in this case when you ship a defeat that there’s immediately another game to focus on?

“That’s the beauty of football and it’s not always the case in life. You always get another opportunity in football, there’s always another game around the corner. So that’s football and it gives you the opportunity to put things right and have that tomorrow night against Waterford.”

That next game comes in the form of Waterford who had an exciting 2-2 draw with Shelbourne on Monday. They’re a good footballing team and will hand us a stern test on Friday.

“We know it’s a difficult game, we know Waterford have been very good. We’ve watched them really closely all season because of Conan Noonan (on loan from Rovers to Waterford this season and can’t play tomorrow night), so they’ve been very good, especially since the new management under John Coleman have gone in. They’re playing slightly differently, so we need to be at our best tomorrow to go and win the game.”

Padraig Amond rightly gets much of the praise given his goals, particularly also that he’s 37 years of age, but our own Conan has also been excellent for them in his loan spell, so how good a job has manager John Coleman done for Waterford since replacing Keith Long in May?

“I think they’re different types of managers. No style is better, it’s just they’re different and you could see it in the game they won last week (2-1 over Bohemians) and they could’ve won by more goals. That’s the type of team Waterford are, they create opportunities and are playing well, so I’ve no doubt they’ll come to Tallaght tomorrow and enjoy playing here. We need to make sure they don’t enjoy it too much and that we’re at our levels. So they are a threat, we know what they have in the attacking part of the pitch but they’re a threat all over the pitch. So we need to make sure we’re at our best.”

Adam Matthews remains on the injured list. Did everyone come out of the Bohs game ok and how’s Trevor Clarke’s injury?

“Trevor is good. He missed Monday’s game, but he trained yesterday and everyone else is ok. There’s the usual few knocks which is normal but everyone else is ok.”