'Happy' Ruaidhri Higgins hunting for more Coleraine away-day delight in Portadown clash

A 4-0 success over Crusaders last Saturday featured Joel Cooper’s double plus goals from Matthew Shevlin and Declan McManus to help the Bannsiders bank a fourth win from five and extend the unbeaten Sports Direct Premiership start.

Now that record will be put to the test at Shamrock Park today – but with Higgins “happy with our points return”.

“There's no point in getting away from it…we are happy,” said Higgins during his pre-match press conference. “And if you look at the fixtures we've had, we've had some tough fixtures.

"We'll now play our third away game on the spin, it'll be our fourth away out of the six games...so we're happy with our points return.

"We have good players here...we have really good players.

"We have good depth...we have seven or eight unavailable to us at the minute but if you look at the team that took the pitch last weekend (against Crusaders), we still have real talent and we put in a brilliant display.”

Higgins was full of praise for the team performance towards victory over the Crues.

"That's probably a good indication of how we want to go about our business,” he said. “We were really, really good in both parts of the game...in possession and out of possession.

"And we want to continue that.”

Higgins, however, has added injury issues for the Portadown challenge.

“Charles (Dunne)...we'll see how it develops, ankles can heal quite quickly,” said the Coleraine boss. “Kodi (Lyons-Foster) we're hoping we have available.

"Jamie McGonigle will be somewhere in the region of eight to 12 weeks, he's done his quad in the warm-up before the North West Cup game, a really bad one.”

Higgins highlighted Cameron Stewart against Crusaders as someone who “had a tough time last year” but “a brilliant pre-season”.

He singled out Stewart as “outstanding in the game" who “really give us a platform in possession, defended well”.