Had Cork City repeated their league start of last year they would be four points clear going into Friday's clash with defending champions Shelbourne. The nine wins they recorded during their opening 10 games last year would have left them nine points better off than Bohemians are this week.

Still, as he discussed his side's 2-0 win over Galway United on Sunday Derek Mountfield wasn't complaining. Grinning the grin of a man who has had a weight lifted from his shoulders, Mountfield praised his players where a week before he had castigated them for their lack of commitment to the cause.

In fact, the sense of disillusionment with the team's performances was sufficient in some quarters for the club's announcement of a press conference last Friday to be taken as a sign that City's directors were about to opt for a second managerial switch in less than six months.

Instead Mountfield, along with his chairman Terry Dunne, revealed that their promising youngster Damien Delaney would be following Colin Murphy to Leicester City and that Michael Devine would be joining an already extensive range of other goalkeepers at Turners' Cross.

Your assessment of the day's dealings may depend to a large degree on whether you are one of the five goalkeepers who had already been hanging round the place (and in particular, whether you are Noel Mooney) but to those readers who have never had to thank the good Lord for Declan Daly last thing each night, it probably all looks like a decent enough piece of business.

Devine, unhappy at Waterford since his own heroics had proven insufficient to keep them in the top flight, reportedly cost City £15,000 while the down payment on Delaney is said to be £50,000 with more to come if the teenager makes the grade.

The pity is that Murphy wasn't sufficiently impressed with the set up at a club he briefly ran over the summer to buy the defender and then leave him with Mountfield for at least the rest of the season. It would be good to think that somebody finally reckoned that to leave the player here was better than youth, or even reserve team football in Britain, but sadly we still seem to be some way off that point.

Devine, meanwhile, had little enough opportunity to prove his worth on Sunday with Galway's young players giving a decent enough account of themselves in extremely difficult circumstances but never really testing the debutant goalkeeper.

All around him there were signs that things may be starting to improve for Mountfield and his men. Their record before the game was fairly abysmal - one win and just four goals in seven league outings. But aside from Devine's arrival, there was a first league start for Derek Coughlan, whose collapsed move to England during the summer had left him sidelined for much of the time since, as well as a first start of any description for Fergus O'Donoghue, called in at the last minute to play left back after Stephen Napier had aggravated a calf strain during the pre-match warm up.

Both did well which, when combined with a strong performances across the midfield, including one from Greg O'Halloran, who is being usefully employed on the right side of midfield these days, must have gone a long way towards restoring the manager's smile.

Best of all for Mountfield, though, will have been the showing by his strikers, each of whom got a goal and contributed a good deal more besides. With three goals now in as many games Pat Morley certainly seems to hitting one of the sort of runs that made him the league's top scorer last season. If the 35-year-old could reproduce that sort of form again this year and James Mulligan yielded something like his career average of a goal every three games, then it's hard to see how City wouldn't be there challenging come the end of April for they rarely suffer too badly at the other end.

The prospects for Cork's remaining six months of the campaign look surprisingly bright given the form to date. Friday night, by which time Mountfield expects to have spent some more of last week's income, will tell us more about his ability to deliver with the southerners and Friday week's visit to Inchicore will be an interesting test too.