Sean Maguire marks pre-season debut with hat-trick

Sean Maguire netted a hat-trick in his pre-season debut against Fylde on Saturday.

Maguire scored twice in the opening 15 minutes before teammate Billy Bodin added a third goal just before half-time. Maguire then added a fourth goal on the hour mark to complete his hat-trick. https://twitter.com/pnefc/status/1150138753765314560

  “Obviously it’s my first game and I’ve been in about ten days now, so I got back in full training with the boys during the week in Ireland,” the forward told iFollow PNE post-match. “I’ve been working quite hard with the strength and conditioning coach Tom Little, so it was good to get back on the pitch today and it couldn’t have got off to a better start. “I know it’s only pre-season but gaining that bit of confidence is vital to the way I play and you start as you mean to go on, so it’s a great start. “That’s five goals in 90 minutes [in the last two summer friendlies against Fylde] now! We’ve a couple more games to the start of the season, the season’s only about three weeks away, so we started off the pre-season with three games and three wins and a lot of goals as well.”

Maguire was plagued last season by multiple hamstring injuries but manager Alex Neil remarked that the former Cork striker looked both strong and quick.

“He’s come back a little bit later because of international duty and we got a straight 60 minutes out of him straight away,” he said. “You can see he’s strong, he’s quick. I thought he did both sides of the game very well, he dropped in and linked it, and then spun and got in behind and he was a real threat.