Galway can improve promotion hopes with away win over struggling Armagh

TRIPS north are never the easiest of tasks to extract league points from, but if Galway footballers can ‘pull’ a result from their Division 2 clash with Armagh at the Athletic Grounds on Sunday (2.30), then they’ll be well placed for a promotion push.

The league’s second division though is something of a riddle in terms of predicting results with Galway having taken maximum points from their two away fixtures against Laois and Derry, but just one, from their two home ties against Tyrone and Meath.

All things considered, and given Galway’s casualty list at the start of the campaign, Kevin Walsh’s charges are reasonably well positioned on five points with three matches to go, but there is very little mid-table space between the promotion seekers and the relegation battlers.

Galway’s affair with Meath last Sunday took some figuring out. For the first 35 minutes, Galway looked odds-on to suffer a defeat of humiliating dimension before turning in a vintage half hour of football that appeared to have them on the road to victory.

In the end, they had to settle for the draw but it was still a result that left Galway on their own in second place of the Division 2 table, a point ahead of Cavan, Fermanagh and Derry.

Armagh suffered a humiliating 17 points (3-18 to 0-10) defeat at the hands of Cavan last weekend, a result apparently that set manager Kieran McGeeney into a bout of surprisingly frank, post-match soul searching.

In interviews after the match, McGeeney said that he had quality players but blamed himself for not ‘doing the right thing’ in the aftermath of the Cavan hammering.

That’s a scenario though that might send alarm bells ringing in Kevin Walsh’s head, given that Meath started off against Galway last Sunday from a similar position of woe.

The previous Sunday, Meath had squandered an eight point interval advantage against Cavan – and were in the end beaten by seven – but bounced back to blitz Galway in the first half.

Galway though will respect Armagh without fearing them and they will be hoping on Friday night, when they go through their training routine, that midfielder Fiontán Ó Curraoin has recovered from a hamstring injury that kept him out of their last two matches.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.