Alan Mulholland admits cutting his Galway football panel will be an unenviable task.

The new Galway boss has been working with an extended panel since the start of the year, but with the first round of the NFL against Derry on February 5 fast approaching, he needs to trim his squad to 35.

"We wanted to give the young lads a chance to see who is good enough at this level, and the lads we have brought in have done well and shown they are up to it," Mulholland said in an interview with RTE after Galway completed their FBD League campaign with an impressive win over Sligo yesterday.

"What we are trying to do now is get down to the 30 or 35 players we are going to carry for the Allianz League, and we will do that in the next week to ten days. Finalising the panel will be very difficult. The problem you have is with the lads that are not U21 anymore. There is no safety net for them.

"If we don't carry them into the League panel then they go back to their clubs and, with all respect to the clubs, the training they will be doing would not be as intense as we will be doing at inter-county level.

"Those are the real heartbreaking decisions for me, and how to keep them involved when they are not going to be playing regular games with us is the real challenge." Tweet

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