Shropshire Star

Table-topping TNS up for the cup with Friday night football

The New Saints take a break from their fine run of 12 league wins in a row at the top of the JD Cymru Premier as they target progress in the JD Welsh Cup tonight.

Published

Saints, the Welsh Cup holders, face Caernarfon Town in a third-round tie at Park Hall (7.45pm).

Caernarfon are currently fifth in the JD Cymru Premier, 16 points behind the leaders, with Saints 3-0 winners when the teams recently met in Oswestry in a league match.

TNS head coach Craig Harrison was pleased with his side’s latest performance when they beat Cardiff Metropolitan University 4-0 last weekend to add three more points to their total.

Looking ahead to tonight’s game, he said ‘anything can happen in the cup’ and highlighted the last round of the competition when Saints progressed via a penalty shoot-out success following a 1-1 draw at lower division Chirk AAA. “It just proves the last round, doesn’t it?” said Harrison. “I don’t know how many positions there were between ourselves and Chirk – and Chirk hang on in there to get to penalties.

“Obviously, we got through on penalties, so it just proves the point of cup football. It is what it is.

“It’s very much cliché and a very boring answer, but anything can happen in the cup.

“We’ve just got to make sure that, no doubt about it, as we see in the last round, there were big teams exit the competition, Cardiff Met, Haverfordwest, and we don’t want to be one of them.

“Fortunately, we weren’t in the previous round, and we don’t want to be a big club to be getting knocked out at this stage of the competition.

“We want to go deep into it, if not win it, so it’s something that we need to be focused for, but we will be.

“We’ve had another good week of training. Referring back to the game on Saturday, I thought we were very, very good.

“All-round performance was as good as we’ve been and the lads have been spot on in training this week as well.”