Football: Glenfield striker has eye on Chatham Cup

Glenfield Rovers striker Michael Gwyther. Photo / File

Glenfield Rovers striker Michael Gwyther is a man on a goal-scoring mission.

The 27-year old personal trainer has scored 33 league goals in 32 games over the past two seasons to help fire Glenfield from the depths of the Northern League First Division to the top of the Premier League, and now he has his sights set on the Chatham Cup.

Standing in the way is a fourth round clash with Central United, a team that has won the national knockout tournament five times, but Gwyther believes Glenfield have the talent to win the Cup for the first time in the club's history.

"This game is so massive for us,"Gwyther said. "It's easily the most talented Northern League team I've played for and one of our team goals is to win the Cup. But Central will be tough. They've got all their Auckland City stars back and will be a handful, but we have a lot of national league players too. It should be a great game."

Glenfield boast Allan Pearce, Steven Holloway, Joe Edwards, Chris Bale, Alex Feneridis, Andrew Milne, Richard Beard, Tamati Williams and Gwyther with national league experience, but have lost central defensive pairing Sam Jasper and Matt Cunneen for the season with broken bones.

The league-leaders are on an eight match winning streak and are in hot form, scoring 16 goals in their last five games. It's been a rapid turnaround from a side that only managed five points from their first four games this year.

"We have now developed that winning habit, but we started the season a bit slow. We had a great team on paper, but were a bit unfamiliar with each other. Now we've started to click, we score a lot of goals and are solid defensively."

Central, who sit in seventh place in the Premier League, are led by Auckland City standout Emiliano Tade and have quality in Korean import Dae Wook Kim and Japanese left back Takuya Iwata.

Last round they came back from 3-0 down, with ten men, to beat Birkenhead 4-3 in a thriller at Sheperds Park.

Glenfield and Central will meet at 2pm today at Kiwitea Street in Auckland.