Trio are facing up to a drop in quality
RELEGATION beckons for Galway United, Sligo Rovers or St Patrick’s Athletic this evening as the League of Ireland season reaches an agonising climax for those mired at the bottom.
They have been there for the guts of the last eight months. Scrapping, fighting and struggling, all in the hope of clawing themselves to safety. Their nails have been worn to the bone. There will be blood.
A year in which a sense of dread steadily grew following every agonising Friday night and left players, staff and fans bereft of hope is about to end exactly how they imagined. Relegation. Despair. Loathing. It will be a long winter, not just of discontent, but demoralisation. One of these clubs, is about to be put out of its misery but the pain will linger. A grim existence awaits in the First Division. Drogheda United are already there, their pitiful lurch into the abyss confirmed long ago, while Finn Harps’ commendable resistance is no more following last week’s results.
Things couldn’t be more straighforward for St Pat’s and Sligo; avoid defeat away to Derry and Drogheda respectively and they are safe regardless of what happens between Galway and Dundalk at Eamonn Deacy Park.
Shane Keegan’s Galway side must win and, thanks to their superior goal difference, hope for one final catastrophe involving their rivals.
Relegation will be the full effect of the FAI’s decision to push through restructuring without unanimous backing from all 12 members of the Premier Clubs Alliance hitting home.
The rights and wrongs of a return to a 10-team top tier have already been debated and competition director Fran Gavin admitted earlier this week that they are still trying to figure out the best way of ensuring a healthy competition in 2018.
The return of the promotion/ relegation play-off between the team which finishes ninth in the Premier and second in the First Division has already been confirmed, but finding a way of avoiding the monotony of teams playing each other four times has yet to be established.
Champions Cork City and rivals Dundalk have already shown this week that they are not waiting around for league chiefs to get their own houses in order.
While Sligo and St Pat’s, champions in 2012 and ’13 respectively before the Dundalk-Cork rivalry took over Irish football, are perilously close to dropping out of the top flight, the grand plans of Stephen Kenny and John Caulfield’s to ensure their status as standard bearers are coming to fruition.
St Pat’s switched to evening training sessions this season to allow some of their squad to balance football with fulltime work and that has shown on the pitch. Cork and Dundalk both re-signed key players this week and in the case of midfielders Gearoid Morrissey and Conor McCormack their new contracts at Turner’s Cross will run for 52 weeks of the year.
So, as standards at two very recent champions have slipped, Cork and Dundalk have already raised theirs before this season is even out.
KATIE TAYLOR admits she is facing the biggest night of her boxing career ahead of her first world title bout as a professional in Cardiff’s Principality Stadium tomorrow. Taylor faces WBA lightweight champion Anahi Esther Sanchez on the undercard to Anthony Joshua’s heavyweight defence against Carlos Takem in front of more than 70,000 spectators, and she believes it will be bigger than the Olympic gold or the five world titles she collected as an amateur. ‘This will be the biggest night of my career, without a doubt,’ Taylor proclaimed. ‘I’m so excited about it. Ever since I turned pro, I wanted to fight for a world title and fight on the biggest boxing night. This is the sort of fight that will elevate women’s boxing to new heights. ‘And it is a fight that is going to open a lot of doors for me, open up opportunities for even bigger fights down the road. Hopefully this will be the first of many titles for me. I want to unify the lightweight division but I need to focus on the first one.’ Tomorrow night’s clash will be Taylor’s seventh fight in a whirlwind first