Galway FC rise to the occasion in earning promotion to the top flight football
Galway FC’s promotion celebrations will continue this weekend when the club holds its Player of the Year awards in Monroe’s Tavern in the city on Saturday (8pm), but work has already begun on planning for life in the top flight of Irish football next season.
Friday night’s 3-0 win over UCD secured a 5-1 aggregate win for Galway FC in the SSE Airtricity League promotion final and with it a place in the Premier Division next season, capping a magical season for the Tribesmen.
Tommy Dunne was back at his desk in Eamonn Deacy Park on Monday, after spending the weekend celebrating with officials and fans as well as family and friends, which included attending the FAI Cup Final in the Aviva Stadium on Sunday.
“It was a great weekend, people were constantly coming up to me at the cup final congratulating Galway on getting back to the Premier Division, there is a lot of goodwill out there towards the club.
“I’m delighted to be at the top table again, I think it’s important for a club this size to be in the Premier Division – you’ve no divine right, you have to earn it and those players earned it out there, they were brilliant,” Dunne said.
Dunne will obviously need to improve his squad for the step-up in quality they will face next season, but he will need an increased budget to do so, and talks on what kind of money is available for him for 2015 began this week, although lessons from the past will clearly be heeded.
“We go to the top flight, we are going to have to work harder on and off the pitch, we have to generate more money to maybe invest more in the team and the structures of the club, but we are not going to start throwing money at it just because we are in the Premier Division.
“There are a lot of people around here that know what happened when those days were around, but for us it will need to be increased and we will have to work hard as a club to get more sponsorship. Of course you’ll have to increase your budget but what it is, we don’t know yet,” he said.
That said, there won’t be wholesale changes, and the one quality he is looking for is, in his own words, “hunger”.
“The game is about players and if you don’t have hungry players and you don’t have players who are prepared to do the work week in week out and listen and learn and fight and die for each other, well then you are wasting your time,” he said.
One of the most impressive parts of this season is in relation to Dunne’s players – the starting XI on Friday night had an average age of just 22, the youngest squad across both divisions, and 13 of the 18-man match-day squad hail from Galway, with three others from neighbouring counties of Mayo, Westmeath and Limerick. Paddy Parrett (Waterford) and Jake Keegan (America) were the other two.
While Dunne admits his side’s slow start to the season – they had to wait five games for their first win – it was really their third quarter of the season which cost them a shot at the title, with the side taking just seven points from a possible 21 in that little run from June to August.
However, after suffering a 1-0 defeat away to Wexford Youths on August 8, Dunne’s side rallied for the last quarter of the campaign and wouldn’t lose again, wining their next five games and then drawing their last two to book their place in the play-offs.
They then clinched promotion in clinical style, beating both Shelbourne and UCD home and away to win 4-1 and 5-1 on aggregate respectively, and that run of form is something Dunne wants to tap into at the start of next season.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.