Gor Mahia’s McKinstry calls for calm after abysmal preseason

Following a horrendous preseason, Gor Mahia head coach Johnathan McKinstry has asked the K’Ogalo faithful not to sound the alarm bells.

The record league champions have only won one of their nine pre-season games with the most recent loss coming against Nairobi City Stars last Saturday.

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The Northern Irish head coach explained that the poor results in preseason were due to the team missing a number of players from their first-team squad.

“The games that we have lost are the ones that we did not have our first 11 out. That is not to mean that we have taken preseason lightly, all we need to do is be more clinical because we are creating chances.

It is very hard to find a striker who scores goals regularly, that is why teams in Europe spend 80M or 90M euros on strikers these days,” said McKinstry.

Gor Mahia’s sole victory in preseason came against FC Talanta while they suffered losses against Marafiki FC, KCB, Bandari, Posta Rangers, Wazito (Muhoroni Youth), and recently to Nairobi City Stars, with matches against Ulinzi Stars and Bidco United ending in draws.

McKinstry noted that ahead of their season-opening clash against Nzoia Sugar on Saturday, changes are expected in the starting lineup as he asked fans to maintain their cool.

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“There are going to be a few tweaks, we saw some good stuff in the City Stars game. The team will be a bit different with guys coming back from sickness, maybe we will have three or four people who retain their place in the Nzoia game.

I'm not worried and they (fans) should not be, one or two of those games were B-team games. For example, the Marafiki game was a B team game, like many teams in the league we played Saturday and Sunday games in preseason so we had to use squad players,” added McKinstry.