Preview: Cork City vs Galway United

Galway United visit Turners Cross tonight for an 8pm Kick-Off in a rare midweek SSE Airtricity Women’s Premier Division Fixture tonight and manager Danny Murphy hopes that the novelty of a midweek fixture at home will help bring some new fans out. “It’s going to be great to play under the lights at Turners Cross tonight, so while the kick-off time is late for some people, especially with younger fans, we hope that other fans might come out and see what we have to offer, because we need that support, it’s a massive game.”

Galway United sit in third place of the table, just five points off leaders Athlone, in a side led by Republic of Ireland International Julie Ann Russell, who scored on her last visit to Cork, in Ireland’s victory over France in Pairc Ui Chaoimh. Galway United are current All-Island Cup Champions and Danny knows the challenge ahead but relishes it. “Again, we want to go into the game and show we can compete with teams at the top of the table. When we’ve played those top teams this season, the performances have been good maybe for an hour but then we concede and then like Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a game plan until they get punched in the face” and the results have been disappointing because we end up trying to survive while chasing a goal.”

Galway drew at home against Wexford last weekend, coincidentally City’s next opponents on Saturday, and will be facing their third game in a week, but that doesn’t lessen the challenge. “It will be a tough game, but we know we are capable of getting wins against strong sides, we’ve done it against Peamount, Bohs, Shamrock Rovers, Wexford so we just need to believe in ourselves, those are teams we wouldn’t get results from in the past. It’s been a successful season in terms of performances, where we’re at and how we’ve done things, but we always want more, we want to be competing at the top end of the table and that starts with showing we can compete with a team like Galway tonight.”