David Crawley scored only his second goal since rejoining Dundalk at the beginning of last year, as he netted a stunning 25-yard free-kick late in the game to save the Lilywhites from their first defeat of the season. The 30-year-old fired the thunderbolt past his old team-mate Steve Williams, and afterwards, he admitted that he is hoping to get more of them during the coming months.   Speaking to dundalkfc.com afterwards, Crawley said: “Willo probably knew where I was going to put it; it’s the only place that I could put it. If you get it up and over the wall, you always have a chance of it going in. In fairness, I probably should be scoring more of them. If I was probably left on my own to concentrate on them, I probably will score more this season, and hopefully get a few more that will win games rather than draw them.” Reflecting on the overall game, Crawley admitted: “We’re a wee bit disappointed. They played a lot of the game with ten men, but in fairness, they battled well. It was bad conditions for the game, but at the end of the day, we got a point away from home. We could have won it in the end, but in fairness to them, they probably deserved a point overall. The big one now is Thursday night, and if we come out of the two games with four points, that’s not bad.

“If you win at home and draw away, you’ll not be too far away. With the point tonight, we’re still unbeaten in the league; we’ve had a great start. Let’s not get too bogged down over tonight. Fingal have a few experienced players out there, and they’re not a bad team. People are underestimating them. They’d be better than the likes of Kilkenny, where you’d be fully expecting to win. It’s going to be a tough league this year, and everybody would like to be where we are at this point.
 
“John was disappointed, because he thought we should have kept the ball more. We made a few silly decisions and our passing wasn’t the best tonight. He did say we showed a wee bit of character to come back, and we did. It’s very hard to play against ten men - I’m not using that as an excuse - but we keep our unbeaten run going, and that’s important.”
 
Dundalk now face into their biggest home game of the season so far when they entertain joint-top Waterford United next Thursday, and Crawley is looking forward to a better performance against the Blues. “It’s going to be a big game,” he admits, “but they are the games that you want to play in. We knew it was going to be tough, with Waterford, Shelbourne and these here. It’s going to be nip and tuck until the end; it’s going to be about who wants it a wee bit more. We’re going to need a wee bit of luck on the way, but I think we have the squad that’s going to be up for it. We probably had a wee bit of an off-night tonight, but we’ll focus on Waterford now.”