Barry Robson outlines Cork City’s transfer plans, provides an injury update and previews tonight’s clash with Treaty United.
As much as the Treaty United game will be taking up a lot of the focus of Barry Robson, the transfer window approaching will be pivotal for City in recruiting for next year’s expected Premier Division status and adding to the currently thin squad at his disposal.
“Well to be fair, I’ve not seen much of the Premier Division, because every game has been on the same time as us. In the next couple of weeks I will be at 2 or 3 games, because I’ll be able to get to some of the games on different days, so I’ll get a lot better scope of what the Premier Division is.”
“I think a big thing, especially in the Irish Premier Division is the physicality, that will be something we will try to recruit on, but we’ll also try to recruit on quality if we can.”
“It’s a tricky window for us. This isn’t a one-window fix for this football club. I think it’s been a bit yo-yo, we’ve all seen that, let’s go try and fix this over 2 or 3 windows and let’s go try and get the club back where it belongs.
City have had a tough time with injuries recently. Robson provided an encouraging update with Seani Maguire returning from injury. However Fiacre Kelleher is now unavailable after a tackle in training.
“We’ve been so unfortunate just tackles and that’s hard. There’s nothing we can do about that. We’ve got Seani Maguire, we’ll have Darragh (Crowley) back, big Fiacre (Kelleher) might be out. We’ve had to delay training, we’re having to give some players some time to get ready. We have a lot of the young players doing exams at the moment, we’ve had to mix and match training a bit.”
City went into the 2026 season with a very thin squad with a small amount of experienced professional players at League of Ireland level. Their injury crisis of late however has given the youth a chance to step up and show their worth, which players like Donal O’Connor has done earning a new contract with the club this week.
“From the minute I came in, I knew the squad wasn’t big enough, it was nowhere near big enough. We’ve got loads of young players playing which is great, but sometimes you can do them a disservice, because they can get caught up.
“This thing where you think we have all of these young players, the problem what happens with that is you end up holding them back. They could end up sitting on the bench and it’s great that they’re getting experience of seeing it (The First Team), but they’re not getting a lot of game time.
“What you really need to be doing with some of the players when they’re 16/17/18, they need to go out on loan, they need to go play regular football, but you need a big enough squad to be able to achieve this.
“So adding numbers to help your squad also pushes the young players back, but it doesn’t really, because you’re pushing them on to actually where we got people watching them and they’re getting valuable game time.”
“There’s lots of things structurally we want to try and do to get better, it takes time and it also takes a lot of finance.”
Cork City take on Treaty United in Turners Cross on Friday Night, with a chance for City to make it a triumvirate of league wins against the Limerick side. It will also be a chance for Ruairí Keating to net another goal against the soon to be Limerick FC, as he has done on the past 2 occasions.
“You got Spain against Cape Verde, look at the quality in Spain, it’s not easy to break teams down. You see Ange Postocoglou talking about, some teams come here against us quite a lot and they do that. It’s down to us as a team to be able to keep that intensity in the game, that’s why I always speak about it.
“We’ve managed to navigate it quite well this season and Treaty have done that, especially in the first game they were here, so I think we’ve been getting better at that and breaking these teams down. Treaty might come and have a go, that would be nice.”