Steven Hyndes insists Portadown remain solely focused on themselves despite closing gap on Championship leaders Dundela

​Niall Currie’s men have won their last five consecutive league matches which means they sit just two points adrift of the Duns heading into the crucial split and, most importantly, the Shamrock Park outfit now know if they win all of them they’ll book a top-flight return for next season.

Another luxury for the Ports is the fact that four of those games will be in front of home support against Dundela, Institute, Annagh United and H&W Welders while they’ll travel to fellow title-chasing Bangor.

"We always knew that the last few games were going to be tight to get in and around Dundela,” Hyndes told the club’s media channel. “We’ve clawed the points back and the credit has to go to the players for doing that.

"It’s in our own hands...we probably don’t think too much about outside of our changing room – it’s about tunnel vision on what we do.

"We’ve a squad there...young Jamie Browne came on having been out and looked fresh again.

"We’re coming in with a lot of freshness over the last five games and at the end of the day it’s four games at home and one away, so we’ll look at it as one game at a time and that’s been our mantle for the last five or six weeks.

"We want to tick off one game at a time and we’ve got to within a couple of points of Dundela.

"It’s all about us and how we perform...I think any team coming to Shamrock Park will find it a hard game and we’re lucky with the way the fixtures have worked out that we have four games at home, so we’ll look forward to that.”

The midweek victory also marked a first league clean sheet for Portadown since an October success against Newington – a run of over 20 matches – and Hyndes admits it was a crucial aspect of the victory.

"The clean sheet was important,” he added. “We played four matches in nine or 10 days which is crazy at this level of football.

"You have to applaud the players – they’ve been absolutely excellent and you can see how fit they are.

"At the start of that wee run we would have taken four wins and thankfully we’ve ticked them off.

"The hardest part was going to Ards away on Tuesday night off the back of being away on the Saturday before that and then you go into another tough match on Friday night against Bangor...we came through it.

"Knockbreda was one of those banana skin ones where they’re coming to stop you playing – they sat in very deep, we were patient and thankfully we got the second goal through Mark Russell.

"I don’t think anybody who watched the match could say we didn’t deserve to win.

"The performances some of the boys put in with four games under their belts was exceptional – they emptied their tanks and the reward was a victory.”