Haverfordwest County AFC’s Development team manager Ceri Phillips wants his team to approach their FAW Youth Cup final against Caernarfon Town in the same relaxed manner that they did prior to defeating Newtown in the semi-finals.

The Bluebirds triumphed over the Robins on spot-kicks to reach a maiden final, which takes place at Park Avenue in Aberystwyth this Sunday at 1pm.

The team have also seen off Canton, Graig Villa Dino, Carmarthen Town, Caerau Ely on their way to the final, facing a variety of different challenges along the way, something that the manager thinks will stand his players in good stead.

Here’s what Ceri had to say in full as he looked ahead to Sunday’s showpiece event:

On the final

We’re looking forward to it. The boys have already created history by being the first Haverfordwest County team to get to the FAW Youth Cup final, so everybody’s excited. They’ve done well to get this far, so fingers crossed we can go one step further now on Sunday and get the win.

On our form heading into the game

In the main. Obviously the boys have had a really good cup run, and, minus a couple of blips against some quality opposition in the league, we’ve been quite competitive all year round. It’s been a good season so far, and we’re coming to the back end of it now with three league games left and obviously the big cup final on Sunday.

It’s been a productive year, a few boys have stepped up to the first team regularly, so all in all we’ve been good so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the season pans out.

On the different challenges the cup run has presented

From the outside looking in, maybe on paper our cup run was looking quite favourable. But some of the opposition we’ve had to play against, we’ve had to step into the unknown and there’s been some difficult places to go and some difficult teams to play against. So it’s been really good for the boys’ development really, with some different experiences.

We get spoiled a little bit in our league at times. We’re playing on some fantastic pitches and against loads of teams that want to play a similar style of football to us, keep the ball and play good football, so when we’ve played against teams from your Cardiff and Newport areas, it’s taught the boys something different and it’s been good for their development to learn to show a different side to their game. We’ve had to do that a couple of times in the cup definitely, so it’s set them in good stead.

So all in all, it’s been a great experience for them so far and it’ll be another good experience now with the pressure of a final and the occasion come Sunday.

On hoping to follow up on last season’s league title

The boys had a really good season last season. They set some goals and targets for themselves as individuals and as a team at the start of the season, and a cup run was one of those things that was on there to try and right the wrongs of last season, and they’ve definitely done that. So full credit to them, and just hopefully now on Sunday they can just go about their business, stick to the game plan that we’re going to work on now for the rest of the week, and hopefully it’ll be enough to get them over the line.

On the challenge of playing a new team

We don’t have the luxury of knowing a great deal about the north teams too often. What we’ve got to go off really is we played TNS in the league play-off last season. It’s quite hard to kind of read really where south development teams are at in comparison to the north. So where we can, we’ll just stick to kind of what we know and try and be ourselves and just maybe fine tune a couple of things off the back of what we saw was Caernarfon’s excellent performance against Newport County in the semi-finals. We’re not a hundred percent sure what to expect, but it’s going to be tough either way. So hopefully the work we put in now this week will be able to put us in good set for the final on Sunday.

On his final message to the players

I think just to try and be relaxed about it really, and just play the game, not the occasion. It’s obviously a clichéd one, but I think they approached the semi-final really well in a relaxed kind of way, didn’t put too much pressure on it, so I just think the lads, we’ve got a really good group here and they’re quite mature despite being young players.

So we’ll have a relaxed kind of week now, not overdoing it, and we’ll just treat it like how we approach most of our weeks really, looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition, how we think we can hurt them, how they might be able to hurt us, and that’ll be the gameplan for Sunday. So just more of the same really.