League of Ireland

Premier Division

Friday 19th June 2026

Kick Off 19.45 Actual 19.47

Galway United 2 Derry City 1, attendance 3,101

24’ 1-0

48’ 2-0

89’ 2-1 (pen)

@ Pearse Stadium

Rockbarton Road

Salthill

Galway

H91 PX30

€10 Admission, plus €1 Booking Fee

€7 Programme available, didn’t bother buying.

I’d visited Galway United’s Eamon Deacy Park (then known as Terryland Park) back in October 1998, for a Division 1 match versus Limerick which had ended 0-0. Pitch renovations are currently taking place there, so Galway are playing a handful of games at Pearse Stadium, home of the Gaelic Athletic Association, with this being the first ever association football match hosted here and the main game of the trip as far as I was concerned. It’s an impressive venue, opened in 1957 and renovated in 2002, with a current capacity of 26,197. It has three sides of steep open terracing and a main seated stand of nearly 8,000 seats, which was the only part of the ground in use tonight. Due to the larger pitch used in G.A.A. matches, the view is distant and the goals are set well in from the terraces at each end.

The match was 7th versus 6th in the league table and a game that the hosts should have won far more comfortably than they did. Derry were very poor and never deserved to get anything out of the game. Galway hit the crossbar after three minutes and opened the scoring after twenty four minutes, when a deep cross from the right was met with a downward header from Stephen Walsh that found the bottom corner. He then made it 2-0 three minutes into the second half, when he met a ball over the top with a left footed finish low into the bottom corner. Derry were given hope of grabbing something from the game late on, when Michael Duffy dispatched a last minute penalty, awarded for a handball by Walsh.

The result sees the clubs remain as they were at start of play, but Galway close the gap between them and Derry to just a single point and they have two games in hand to try and climb above them. Having arrived at the stadium about an hour before kick off, it was easy to grab street parking a couple of hundred yards from the stadium, but the disadvantage was it meant leaving afterwards was a bit slow, not helped by endless traffic lights that seemed to be every few hundred yards apart and the four miles back to our Galway hotel took twenty minutes, rather than the nine minutes it should have, but at least it was still daylight, despite it being 22.20 on arrival.