Brian McCaul is keeping his cards close to his chest over Immaculata’s emergence as title challengers - except to say he’s enjoying putting it up to Star and the East.
The two Premier Division favourites have been jockeying for top spot all season long, with Rathfriland and to a lesser extent Immaculata only mentioned in passing.
But the fact remains both those outsiders have a puncher’s chance of landing a big knockout come the end of the season.
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The Mac lie just four points off the top two with some eight games to go, giving them more than enough scope to overhaul their deficit, particularly with games against the Star and the East still to come during their run-in.
And the same can be said of Rathfriland, albeit they have more ground to make up but more games in which to do it.
In short, the race for the top flight is up in the air, and that suits ‘Bru’ McCaul just fine.
“It’s hard to tell how close we are,” explained the Immaculata player-manager.
“We have a couple of games here against teams below us in the table, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to good results, because we dropped points to Drumaness and drew twice with Larne Tech, so it doesn’t really mean anything.
“And then the rest of our games after that are against teams in the top seven, so I don’t know what’s going to happen.
“I think the key is just trying to stay in there. It’s the old cliche, one game at a time and from where we’ve came from pre-Covid, when we were averaging just over a point a game, we’re aspiring to get to where East Belfast and Crumlin Star are, and getting to the point where games against them are six-pointers.
“We’re in a position where we want to apply a bit of pressure. If we win all our games, and I know that’s a massive ask, but if we do, let’s see what happens.
“Some fixtures look easy on paper, but when there’s pressure to win them, they can be a bit different, and with us chipping away in the background, let’s see what happens.”
As good as they’ve been manoeuvring themselves into third place, McCaul can’t help ruing a damaging 1-0 reverse at home to Ards Rangers last month.
“To be honest, we could have been sitting even better,” he said.
“We played really well, we just couldn’t break them down, missed a couple of chances, so if we had have won that, or got a point, we’d be closer.”
McCaul was on target four times in Saturday’s 5-1 drubbing of Islandmagee at ‘The Cage’, with James Haughey also finding the net.
“I think I was the worst player on the pitch yesterday, one was a penalty, one literally hit me and went in, and the other two were okay goals, I couldn’t do anything right, take the goals away and it wasn’t a great performance personally but happy with the points,” he said.
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