The league's two top side's may show no signs yet of running out of steam in the race for the championship, but at the other end of the top division it's been an interesting month.

Four weeks ago newly promoted sides Bray Wanderers and Waterford United appeared to be successfully bucking the trend of recent years. The pair were involved in the tussle to lead the chasing pack and Wanderers were edging the battle, holding third place by a point from Finn Harps. Now, with fractionally over a third of the season completed, the table is taking on a more uncomfortable look for the new boys. Bray, whose only league win in October was the 6-0 hammering of United, have lost all four of their outings in November and have slipped to eighth place. Waterford have been declining less markedly but even after what was widely regarded as an unwarranted change of manager, there have been signs of slippage.

In the immediate aftermath of Tommy Lynch's replacement by Mike Flanagan, the team - as teams so often do when managers are fired - lifted their game for a couple of results, but now Waterford need to produce the goods more consistently. The bottom of the table now features nearly all of the teams which might have been expected to be there before the campaign got under way. Greater things had been expected of Bohemians while Derry have, despite another dramatic cut in their budget and the loss of their championship-winning manager Felix Healy, performed slightly better than was anticipated.

Bohemians, most people still believe, have too many good players to go down But the rest face some tough times with the sides which suffered the greatest scares over the last two seasons, UCD and Dundalk, appearing to have most to gain from Wanderers and Waterford continuing to slip away.

For United's followers, the next couple of weeks will be of particular interest. When Lynch departed it was said that part of the reason was his failure to spend the money available to him for strengthening the team. Lynch admitted at the time that there was some validity in these complaints. But he pointed out that he had been pursuing a couple of big names, but that the clubs were not interested in selling.

To Lynch's credit, he resisted the urge to get rid of the all the cash anyway and instead took his time to see what came up. As a result Flanagan looks likely to get to spend the money instead and the cash will now probably go across the water with more Englishmen joining striker Steve Brown at the Regional Sports Centre over the coming weeks.

Buying in from outside the league has been shown to be a risky business before and Flanagan, who was hit only last week by a long-term injury to John Frost, will prove his worth to his new employers if he manages to do it well enough to make United into top-six material.

Bray, meanwhile, are unlikely to start writing cheques at the moment. Pat Devlin has been in tighter corners than this before. But then, he's gone down with the club before too.

The signings Devlin made over the summer months looked to have given the Carlisle Grounds club enough strength in depth to cope with the enormous leap they were making into the Premier Division.

There followed a few injury and suspension problems, but with Jason Byrne scoring some key goals, there were fine wins over Rovers, Shelbourne and Bohemians. Despite the presence of more quality than in previous seasons, Barry O'Connor for instance has only recently returned to side after seven weeks on the sidelines, the side has been more settled than in either of the last two campaigns.

Now, however, it has hit a very sticky patch. Next week's game against Shamrock Rovers will not present the most obvious of opportunities to reverse the recent run of poor results, but Devlin knows that things have to be improved soon. Further down the table the managers at Sligo, UCD and Dundalk, as well of course as Roddy Collins at Bohemians, will all be glad to see fortunes of the new arrivals take a turn for the worse.

However, for Longford's Stephen Kenny and John O'Rourke at Cobh - not to mention quite a few neutrals - it would certainly be nice to believe that winning promotion out of the first division amounts to something more than simply the enjoyable outward half of what inevitably turns out to be a rather painful return journey.