It’s low key start as Mervue and Salthill resume league fare

Date Published: 07-Mar-2013

Keith Kelly

AS the footballing world continues to split into opposite camps over the decision to send off Manchester United’s Nani in Tuesday night’s Champions League tie with Real Madrid, the little matter of the start of the 2013 Airtricity League season here at home has slipped even further under the radar than usual.

The Irish domestic league has long played second fiddle to the over-paid and over-hyped stars of the, ahem, ‘world’s greatest league’ in England – a league which will not have a side in the quarter-finals of this year’s premier European competition – while ignoring the entertainment on their own doorstep.

Players such as Roy Keane (Cobh Ramblers), Noel Cantwell (Cork Athletic), Paul McGrath (St Patrick’s Athletic), Kevin Moran (Bohemian FC), Ronnie Whelan (Home Farm), Steve Staunton (Dundalk) and the late Eamonn ‘Chick’ Deacy (Galway Rovers), and more recently, Kevin Doyle (St Patrick’s Athletic), James McClean (Derry City), Shane Long (Cork City) and our own David Forde (Galway United) all began their professional careers in the League of Ireland.

That’s some starting XI of talent, talent which entertained football fans at the likes of Flower Lodge and Terryland Park, Dalymount Park and Glenmalure Park, Richmond Park and Kilcohan Park. But for many, those names only became familiar once the players moved to the ‘big’ league, not realising what they were missing all along just down the road.

Mind you, the authorities running the game here haven’t exactly helped their own cause either, and that is particularly the case this year, which for the first time since 1975 will see no national domestic football at Eamonn Deacy Park (apart from the 1993 season, when the ground – then known as Terryland Park – was closed for redevelopment work).

The FAI have initiated talks between four stakeholders locally – the Galway FA, the Galway United Supporters’ Trust, Mervue United and Salthill Devon – with the aim of having a single representative Galway side in place for the 2014 season, but progress updates are scarce, with the CEO of the FAI, John Delaney, saying this week that “talks are going well”.

As a result, while Galway will have two clubs – Mervue and Salthill – in the First Division of the Airtricity League this season, the majority of football fans in the city and county continue to feel ‘locked out’ of the domestic league as attempts continue to find agreement on what is, without doubt, most beneficial to the whole football community in Galway.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune