Galway United lifted themselves off the bottom of the SSE Airtricity First Division on Friday night with a 2-0 win over Wexford at Eamonn Deacy Park. A stunning long range effort from Conor Barry and a late goal from Maurice Nugent were enough to s
Galway United lifted themselves off the bottom of the SSE Airtricity First Division on Friday night with a 2-0 win over Wexford at Eamonn Deacy Park.
A stunning long range effort from Conor Barry and a late goal from Maurice Nugent were enough to secure the three points for Alan Murphy’s side and the manager was in flying form after his side’s first home win of the season.
“Obviously I’m delighted with the home win. It’s been coming a while with different performances, and half performances, and some poor performances in the middle of games.
“Look, it’s Wexford at home, who we should be beating. It’s no disrespect but we look at it as a scalp to take and we’ve taken it tonight.
“We were a bit nervous at times tonight, the first 15 or 20 minutes we started very slowly, which is probably different to the way we started most games, we’ve probably been the best side in most games and suffered a sucker punch getting a goal against us.”
The manager was full of praise for his side having suffered narrow losses in all of their previous home games.
“I won’t say it’s nice to start poorly tonight and then to get the goal, but it’s nice to get the first goal, and it’s nice to get a little bit of confidence back with this group of players.
“I think it’s very evident to see those players are hugely ambitious and hungry and want to do well. I think they’re playing for me, but they’re playing for that pride and a huge togetherness.
“I take great pride in that from where we were last season to where we are tonight. It’s chalk and cheese in terms of that passion I think.”
The Tribesmen had a stack of chances besides the two goals but poor finishing let them down in front of goal.
“We were giving out four or five weeks ago that there were no opportunities. I’ll go back to what I say every week, it’s small steps and it’s one thing at a time.
“We’ll fix one thing and we’ll look at something else. We fixed the scenario that we weren’t creating any chances, now we need to fix it so that we can put those chances in the back of the net.
“I think that will come. It’s confidence. I’ve been around this game 20 years, I know that if someone is low on confidence it’s not easy to put the ball in the back of the net at times. That’ll help, tonight, it’ll help the fact that we’ve got different players on the pitch tonight too.”
Murphy and his side may be off the bottom of the table but the manager insists it’s not about that for him, the manager is still looking for performances from his young players each week.
“It’s not a table thing at the moment. I don’t say that flippantly as in I don’t care, but I’m not looking at the table. I’m looking at the performance tonight and I’m looking at us trying to beat Wexford at home and trying to get some confidence back, which we’ve done.
“We’ll start looking at tables in five or six games time when we have a few more clean sheets and a few more goals scored and that’s when we’ll start looking.
“This group of players don’t need the pressure of looking at tables at the moment, we’re in initial stages of development as a group. Look at the pride tonight and look at the players playing for each other and for the jersey.”
