By Mike Rafferty

A competitive Premier League has kept Colga, Salthill Devon, Maree-Oranmore, and Mervue United engrossed in a title challenge throughout the season to date, but there will be a change of emphasis this Sunday, when matters change from local to national, as the Galway League side travel to Mullingar for an Oscar Traynor Cup semi-final against the Wexford League (2pm).

The Leinster final just took place in Arklow on Wednesday night, with Wexford – the defending champions – defeating the Leinster Senior League 3-0. First-half goals from Ethan Vickers and Eryk Borowiec eased them to an interval advantage, before Ivan Meegan sealed the win with a third in the second half.

The Wexford side is dominated by players from North End United, who defeated Salthill Devon in the semi-final of the FAI Junior Cup last season. The Leinster grouping was divided into two sections with Wexford seeing off Kilkenny home and away, before advancing to the national stages with Wednesday night’s win.

The Galway League comfortably qualified from their Western group with wins over Roscommon (5-2), Mayo (2-0), and Sligo-Leitrim (5-0), and having topped that group, they automatically qualified for the last four. The other national semi-final is also taking place on Sunday with Milebush hosting the meeting of Donegal and Limerick.

Having come through their campaign to date with a fair degree of comfort, this will be a huge step up against a side who have a greater history in the competition. However, Galway League manager Brendan O’Connor is looking forward to the challenge.

“Obviously, not knowing your opposition until a few days before the game is not ideal, but the important thing now is that we focus on ourselves. I will certainly look to pick up information from the game on Wednesday night, but it is more important that we control what we can and we have had a number of training sessions and will have our last one tonight [Friday] to prepare for the game.

“From a playing personnel point of view, there will be some changes from the squad that saw off Sligo-Leitrim in the last game as Nathan Ward and Gavin Smyth are unavailable, but Timmy Molloy, Liam Murray, and Tom Daly all come back in.

“I am very pleased with the strength that we have and a nice balance of youth and experience. The likes of Conor Winn, Marc Ludden, Padraic Cunningham, and Enda Curran bring many years of playing at the top level in Ireland and that is mixed with a younger generation of players like Calym Crowe, Colm Whelan, Tom Kidd, Adam Molloy, Tom Daly, and Calum Browne, who all add to the mix.”

“Look, our campaign to date has been impressive and apart from the opening half of our first game against Roscommon, we have performed well. We are scoring goals [12] in all games and thankfully conceding few [2].

“We have kept clean sheets in our last two games, but in addition to that we gave away very few scoring opportunities. We will prepare as well as we can for the game and hopefully perform on the day and that is as much as we can do.

“I think we are getting better each time we play. We have a pretty settled squad and in fairness there is a great club mentality about it. We are very aware of Galway’s lack of success in the Oscar Traynor Cup and we will be doing our utmost to get a win on Sunday and qualify for the final,” he said.

Pictured: Colm Whelan celebrates after scoring Galway League’s first goal in their win over the Sligo-Leitrim League in the regional stages earlier in the competition. Photo: Joe O’Shaughnessy.