Thursday March 3rd, 2011 @ 11:02
Saints Head West For League Opener
St Patrick's Athletic begin the 2011 Airtricity League season with a trip to Terryland Park to face Galway United this Friday night with a 7.45 pm kick-off.
The Saints defeated Cliftonville on Tuesday night in the Setanta Sports Cup but that result wasn't enough to overturn the three goal deficit from the first leg and saw Pete Mahon's side depart this year's competition.
New signing David McMillan was on the scoresheet on Tuesday night and the Saints will be looking to him to lead the line on Friday night with last season's top scorer Danny North suspended for this weeks game.
Also suspended are new recruits Stephen Bradley and Paul Crowley but Pete Mahon hopes to have Daryl Kavanagh and Ian Bermingham back in contention having missed the Cliftonville game because of injury and illness respectively.
Another new signing the Saints hope to have available is 20 year old Ian Daly. The club have agreed terms with the Irish Under 21 international and are awaiting international clearance for the former Manchester City striker who has most recently had spells in Greece and Spain.
With Anto Murphy rejoining the club late last week and making an impressive restart to his Saints career Pete Mahon will be looking to improve on last season's fifth place finish and also to bring a trophy back to the Richmond trophy cabinet in 2011.
Manager's Quotes
"We're obviously looking forward to start of campaign proper tomorrow.
"While we are looking forward to it we know we'll be in for a difficult game down in Galway. It's a match we are capable of winning but it's very hard to win away from home in this league.
"We had good success last year with a win and a draw in Terryland and we'll be looking to keep that going.
"We're hoping to continue on improving from Tuesday's game when I thought we played particularly well.
"We didn't pick up any new knocks and everybody trained well last night including Daryl Kavanagh who missed Tuesday's game with a tight hamstring.
"We are still waiting on international clearance for Ian Daly which we hope to have today but Ian Bermingham is still under the weather and will probably miss out along with Danny North, Paul Crowley and Stephen Bradley who are all suspended."
St Pats scored nine goals against Galway United last season but of the six different goalscorers only Derek Doyle (3) remains at the club.
The other five were Ryan Guy (2), Alex Williams, Paul Byrne, Stuart Byrne and Vinny Faherty.