St Patrick's 5 UCD 0:GOALS, or the lack of them, have been the undoing of Liam Buckley's side in this title race and after drawing a blank against Drogheda on Friday night the manager insisted they were working on the problem. It must have been quite a weekend on the training ground, especially for Vinny Faherty, whose second-half hat-trick was just one of the highlights for the home side on a very good night.
Buckley made a handful of changes to his starting line-up but Faherty’s goals notwithstanding, it was probably the return from the outset of Chris Forrester that made greatest impact. The midfielder set up three goals and had a hand in the build up to a fourth.
Jake Kelly opened the scoring 16 minutes into what was a barnstorming start by the home side but the students not only steadied themselves through the latter part of the half but actually managed to look the better side. It didn’t last, though, and after the break the locals threatened to run riot.
It was a remarkable transformation, not least because UCD had taken 16 points from their last seven games. Heading towards the interval it wasn’t hard to understand how they’d done it for Martin Russell’s side gave their opponents the run-around with some confident passing and movement.
Had they taken one of the chances they created – and David McMillan really should have bagged his – it might have been a very different game but they didn’t and from the point when their hosts regained the upper hand it was pretty much one-way traffic.
Faherty got his first just short of an hour in to make it 2-0 after good work by Ryan Coombes and Anto Flood and he then made it 3-0 with a looping header after Forrester, having seen his curling shot come back off the inside of the post, drove the ball back across the face of the goal.
The midfielder teed up Flood for number four by rounding Ger Barron and then squaring the ball to the edge of the six-yard box from where the striker simply had to keep his head and sidefoot home. Faherty didn’t have to an awful lot more to round things off after 82 minutes.
In the end, they were only the better side for three quarters of the game and still the scoreline didn’t remotely flatter St Patrick’s, which won’t be what Dundalk, fresh from their hammering at Tallaght, will want to hear in the run up to Sunday’s FAI Cup semi-final against last night’s winners.
ST PATRICK’S ATHLETIC: Murphy; O’Brien, Browne, Price, Bermingham; Carroll; J Kelly (D Kelly 76 mins), Coombes (Boyne, 80 mins), Forrester, Faherty; Flood (O’Flynn, 80 mins).
UCD: Barron; Douglas (Lyons, 61 mins), Leahy, O’Connor, Nangle; Clarke (Mulhall, 61 mins), McCabe (Kavanagh, 61 mins), OConor, Ledwith; Benson; McMillan.
Referee: T Connolly (Dublin)
