Kayode trusts the process ahead of an important Sweden crash
Ireland’s U21 striker Joshua ‘JJ’ Kayode has said that the tough battle for starting places at the front can only be a good thing when they prepare for tonight’s decisive U21 European Championship qualifier against Sweden at Tallaght Stadium.
The RTÉ2 cameras will be there to provide coverage of a game that is close to “must win” with Ireland in fourth place at the halfway point of its Group F campaign. They are seven points behind tonight’s opponents who currently top the group but have played one match more than them.
Manager Jim Crawford has used a number of different players at the forefront of his attack so far with Kayode, Colm Whelan and Evan Ferguson leading the line at various times.
The Rotherham United player, who was on target in the 2-0 victory over Luxembourg at the Dublin arena last month, believes that the competition drives the players further.
“It’s healthy competition because we’re all strikers who want to do well, who want to play games,” Kayode said.
“We help each other. If a player, we will fight for him to do well. There is no bad blood, everyone wants everyone to do well in this team.
“We’re all pretty tight. There’s one thing with this group of guys, we’re tighter than ever really.
“We have a good contact with each other, the chemistry is good, morale is good. There is competition but we all want each other to do well.”
Kayode was a substitute in the second half of the team’s 2-0 loss to Italy last time out and although the result was not as he would have liked, the player enjoyed his physical battle with Azzurris’ Caleb Okoli.
“He told me that if you want to play we can play like that, so I said okay, let’s run it. It was a good fight.”
Despite the need for points tonight, Kayode said the team would not adopt any special tactics to reflect that requirement.
“We just have to trust the process,” he said.
“We have a game plan, we work very hard on training, we listen to the coaches, the staff.
“We’ll just go out and play as we know how to play and let everything else take care of itself on the pitch.
“There are some things we can improve, we have talked about what we have needed to improve from the last match against Italy.
“We have talked about it, we have worked on it and we want to put it right against Sweden.”
Watch Republic of Ireland Under-21s v Sweden U-21s live on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player tonight, 19.00.