Pressure on manager Caulfield and Galway United to deliver promotion

EVERY Spring heralds a new beginning, a time of hope and optimism, and a promise of good times ahead, and Galway United fans will be hoping for exactly that as the Tribesmen get their 2022 season underway in Turner’s Cross this Friday.

United head into a fifth consecutive season in the First Division, only the second time the club has spent five consecutive campaigns outside the top flight. The only other time that happened was the 2002/03 to ’06 seasons, when the run was ended not by results on the pitch, but decisions off it.

The 2007 season saw the FAI take over the domestic league and form a ‘new’ structure, and an invitation was extended to United – who had finished 3rd in the First Division the previous season – to join the Premier Division. That invite was at the expense of Dundalk, who had finished 2nd, which led to the Christmas Tree in the FAI’s head office being doused in petrol and threatened to be set alight by a disgruntled Dundalk fan.

United can’t rely on such an escape route this time around, they have to do it on the pitch, and that’s the thing – they do actually have to do it, they have to end five years of mediocrity, and failure to win promotion in 2022 will be just that: a failure.

It is sometimes said that United are a sleeping giant, but only the ‘sleeping’ part of that description is true. The Tribesmen have never been even close to being a dominant force in the domestic league, one only has to look at the trophy cabinet for confirmation of that.

Even then, a cabinet is being generous – a little sideboard would be plenty big to accommodate the one FAI Cup, two League Cups and one First Division title the club has won in the 43 seasons it has spent in the league.

Here’s a sobering statistic to show just where United stand in terms of the domestic game: since the club’s last domestic trophy the 1996/97 League Cup, every other club in the league has lifted at least one trophy.

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

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