Galway United 1

Dundalk 1

IT turns out that, no, they couldn’t. On a depressing night in Eamonn Deacy Park, Galway United put in the most Galway United of performances, conceding a late equaliser to the league’s basement side to drop two points and miss out on the chance to go second in the table.

The question was posed in our preview on these pages last week if United could be a dark horse to actually go on and win the league: after this result and display, you would have to be worried about them finishing in the top half of the table at all, never mind qualifying for Europe.

In front of their second biggest crowd of the season – officially given as 4,128, four shy of the 4,132 from the Shamrock Rovers game back in March – the home side huffed and puffed and, dare we say, cramped-up on the big occasion.

It was a rare instance of United going into a game as raging-hot favourites, and really, they should be putting away the league’s basement side, a gang of players waiting for wages and for a first win in 10 games, a team on a run of five straight defeats and just one away win all season.

Instead, United failed to live up to expectation, allowing themselves to be bossed around on their own patch by a side destined for relegation, before being punished for dropping deeper and deeper towards their own goal trying to protect their slender lead.

Maybe assistant manager, Ollie Horgan, was right after the game when he said that results, and not performances, were all that mattered at this stage of the season, but if you fail to perform, then you can’t expect to get the result.

Rather than looking to stamp their authority all over the game after Patrick Hickey headed them into a 40th minute lead, United instead chose to try and hold on to that advantage. It was an approach that invited trouble, and right at the end, trouble came calling with a bang.

The other main talking point on the night was how Greg Cunningham’s season was ended in injury-time by a crunching tackle from former United player, Aodh Dervin.

Dervin didn’t manage to complete 90 minutes in a United game this season before being shipped off to Dundalk in the summer, and he was lucky to have been allowed to do so on Friday night.

Pictured: Galway United’s Karl O’Sullivan on the move against Koen Oostenbrink of Dundalk during Friday’s Premier Division tie at Eamonn Deacy Park. Photo: Joe O’Shaughnessy.