Galway United set for busy weekend with two games in four days

Tonight's game could well be a dress-rehearsal for the cup final in early November - Bohs host Waterford in the other semi-final - but the focus across the two games will be on league standings, as back-to-back wins could lift United to fifth in the table.

A lot of the season has been spent looking over the shoulder at the teams below them, and Waterford's incredible turnaround in for under Graham Coughlan has led to some jitters about being dragged into the relegation conversation, but United are on a good run of form with three wins in their last four games, and a nine-game unbeaten run which matches their best spell since returning to the top flight in 2024.

Bohs head to the Dyke Road on the back of a four-match winning run, including last Saturday's penalty shoot-out win over St Patrick's Athletic which has seen them installed as favourites to lift the cup. United have taken just a point from three meetings with the Phibsboro outfit this season, but they did win twice against the Gypsies last season.

United then head to the home of their provincial rivals on Monday evening looking to make it four wins on the spin against a Sligo Rovers side who face their own defining weekend, as the basement side are away to a Drogheda United outfit on Friday that sits one place and five points above them in the table.

"We just need to get the bodies right, get the recovery right and hopefully get some boys back that were missing," United assistant manager, Richie Holland, said after last Friday's win over Drogheda in the cup, revealing that there had been an illness in the camp in the days leading up to the game.

That had sidelined some players that might have been expected to have been involved - both David Hurley and Ed McCarthy were unused subs - while United will also be sweating over the fitness of Leigh Kavanagh, who had to be helped off in the dying stages of that win last Friday.

"Hopefully we'll be ready for that double weekend because those games do take a lot out of the players, you know. So we need to need to be spot-on with our training," he said, agreeing that avoiding extra-time last Friday was no harm.

"Yeah, look, it took a bit of magic for us to win the game. And, you know, we're glad that we had that composure at that vital moment, that Lee was able to get the ball on his right foot and put it away because you could see there at the end, Drogheda were throwing everything at us.

"It's a cup game, it has a different feel, the crowd was up, everything like that. So we knew even after we scored, there was nothing easy coming. We had to defend the box, and we did that well. We've been doing that now for quite a while, but as you say, we have to go again next week, and that's the challenge, but we got the win, and that's what counts," he said.

A lot of the league focus has been on the dramatic turnaround in fortunes for Waterford under Graham Coughlan, who looks set to steer the Blues to safety, having taken over in May when the side hadn't won any of their opening 14 league games and had taken just six points in that spell. They are now on an 11-game unbeaten run across all competitors, but United haven't been too shabby in recent times either, and are unbeaten in nine games.

"We don't mind that," he says of all the chatter about Waterford's revival, "we'll just go and do our business and we keep saying to the lads, if they keep working hard and they keep putting in a shift for the club and the badge, then we'll get results and we'll be fine, but if we drop our levels at all, in this league, you get punished.

"It has been great now the last couple months, but we have to keep going, and that's a challenge for us as a group, for the players, the staff, every one of us, that we need to keep going every single day because, you know, there's some big games to come and it's important for us that we're ready," he says.