Duffy aiming to do better as Derry's league campaign resumes

Derry City vs. Galway United | Ryan McBride Brandywell Stadium | Friday, 7:45pm

Michael Duffy is aiming to regain his early season form as Derry City resume their league campaign against Galway United tomorrow with a mountain to climb to catch Shamrock Rovers at the top of the Premier Division.

Nine points separate the two rivals at present following successive defeats for Tiernan Lynch's team, a double setback which has stopped City’s momentum in its tracks after a run of five wins in six games. That winning run took them to within two points of first place, but that progress was almost eradicated completely with losses to Rovers and Bohemians before the mid-season break.

Duffy, who is City’s top scorer with six league goals, has failed to find the net in any of his last five games and was taken off at half-time at Dalymount Park, but he is hoping the break will help him get back to his previous levels.

“It’s not great ending on a loss before you go away on your break because you can’t put it right for another two weeks and it plays on your mind, but I think the break was needed too,” he said.

“You play a lot of games in the first three months of the season and there’s loads of ups and downs and sometimes you just need that break to reset and get that time away from football, and we all enjoyed it, but we’re back in this week and it’s been a good week’s training so far and we’re looking forward to Friday and getting back to winning ways is the main things.”

“The last few games haven’t really been good enough and obviously I want to put that right as soon as I can. Every week I want to be scoring or setting up goals or at least playing well, and I don’t think that I have done that in the last few games, so I can’t wait for Friday so I can personally go and try and put my own performances right and help us get back to winning ways.”

Last season Derry City took just two points from four games against Galway United, but they have already doubled that in 2025, a 1-1 draw at the Brandywell in March followed by a memorable 3-2 win at Eamon Deacy Park in April. That victory in Galway was the spark for City’s best form of the season, winning five out of six league games.

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“John and Ollie have them brilliantly set up and I think every team struggles to score against them,” Duffy reflected. “They are horrible to play against at times, and they have a couple of really good players this year on the attacking side of it. We know how tough it’s going to be, but the two times we’ve played against them, we’ve done really well.

“Down in Galway we had a massive win, and it turned our season a wee bit because we went on a bit of a run. We were brilliant that night so we can look at the games we’ve played, because we stopped their threats, we affected them the whole game and we’ll be looking to do the same again last season.”

Discipline has been a problem for Derry City so far this season, with four on-field red cards and two off-field. Those, combined with over 50 yellow cards in 18 league games, has led to multiple suspensions and tremendous inconsistency in team selections. Officials have been criticised throughout this campaign, and Duffy feels that all of City’s red cards could have been avoided.

“I think its mix and match at times,” he explained. “I feel like we seem to be getting on the wrong side of refs this year with some decisions. Whenever Robbie (Benson) came on at Bohs, he made one foul and he got a yellow card straight away; we’ve been on that side of that a lot this season.

“Every team will go through it too so you can’t really complain that way, but if you look over most of the games every week there probably is a load of yellow cards every week, and I think they are given out quite easily in our league.”

“I think all of those decisions, on another night, the player is just getting a yellow and you’re finishing the game with 11 men.

“In all those games, we’ve lost most of them except Rovers, which we drew. But even in that game, they had a man sent off and Danny (Mullen) has made two fouls and we’re down to ten men then.

“We could have gone on to get three points in that game. But hopefully, we get the luck of the draw in the second half of the season.”