As Shamrock Rovers close in on the League of Ireland title, the spotlight is on manager Michael O’Neill and his ability to take the club forward again next year.
By Shane Breslin
Shamrock Rovers fans may not thank me for mentioning it, but it would now take a meteoric fall – I never did understand why meteoric was generally associated with the word “rise†– for the Hoops to miss out on a first League of Ireland title in 16 years when the garlands are distributed in about six weeks’ time.
Okay, there are five games left, and the old cliché declares serenely that anything can happen. Surely, though, this time anything can’t happen. Having followed their momentary lapse of sanity in Dundalk by putting nine goals past Galway United without reply over the past two weekends, Rovers are champions-in-waiting. Even a defeat to Bohemians next Tuesday night would be insufficient to knock them off their perch. Win three of their other four games and it won’t really matter what Bohs do between now and the end of the season.
And that’s not taking into account that the Gypsies themselves have a tricky end to the season, starting with this weekend’s visit of a Bray Wanderers side which has been transformed over the past month, claiming almost as many points in their last five games as they did in the first 26.
So it needs to be said: the league is all over bar the shouting, and the shouting will stop everywhere except for Tallaght if the Hoops can come away from Dalymount Park next week with anything better than a defeat.
It may be a tad premature but attention turns to the post-season, and the direction Rovers could take as they try to tighten the noose on their rivals for top domestic honours. On the evidence of this year, with St Patrick’s Athletic and last weekend’s League Cup winners Sligo Rovers punching above their weight and Sporting Fingal still some way short of the finished article, Bohemians are the only credible opponents for the Hoops.
However, the 2008 and 2009 champions could find themselves slipping back into the pack as they feel the full brunt of the overspending which has left them on the brink this year. Certainly, with the sale of Dalymount Park to Nama-ed property developer Liam Carroll effectively dead in the water, any continuation of the type of expenditure which made Bohs the princes to the rest of the League of Ireland’s paupers would appear to be impossible.
There exists, then, the very real prospect that Rovers will, almost literally, be the only show in town from the beginning of the 2011 season. To copperfasten that position, manager Michael O’Neill and the board of directors face a couple of avenues. If they are to emulate their predecessors, they will cherry-pick the best players from their rival clubs. As well as snapping up some of the best players in the league last winter – names such as Mark Quigley (ex-St Patrick’s Athletic), Gareth McGlynn (formerly Derry City) and Raffaele Cretaro (by way of Sligo Rovers) spring readily to mind – the current Bohemians squad contains a couple of players who won the league with Drogheda in 2007. That Drogheda team, in turn, leant heavily on the Shelbourne squad which had dominated the league before them.
Rovers will have the opportunity to harvest their rival clubs in the close season. While cost-cutting measures will again be in place at most League of Ireland clubs, the Tallaght boys can operate on a firm financial footing, with average home crowds hovering around 4000, a quality merchandising operation in and around Tallaght and the certainty of Champions League revenue to come.
For Rovers, though, emulating their predecessors should be avoided at all costs. For a decade, every League of Ireland champion has, Icarus-like, flown too close to the sun and been engulfed by the sea as a result.
While Rovers have drafted in a number of proven League of Ireland winners in recent years, most notably the ex-Cork City defensive pair Dan Murray and Danny Murphy and their former Turners Cross comrade Neale Fenn, who also won titles at Bohs, the club has indisputably enjoyed greater success with outside recruits.
Gary Twigg, who arrived in Dublin from the football backwaters of Brechin City and the Derby County reserves, was top scorer in the League last season and needs just one more in the next five games to repeat the feat this time around. Alan Mannus, the former Linfield and Northern Ireland international goalkeeper, has produced save after vital save since supplanting the fans’ favourite Barry Murphy last year. Craig Sives had drifted from Tynecastle to Tynecastle FC in the East of Scotland Football League before the call came from the Hoops last year.
Michael O’Neill may have been working off the deepest playing squad in the league this year but that fact should not dilute his achievements. He has managed to elicit fine performances – champion performances – from that most unappealing of vistas: limited players whose careers had stagnated. It might be stretching it to suggest that the Ulsterman has made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but it’s along those lines.
The two-fold test now is whether he can lift the club another level. Firstly, he must recruit players superior to those who have taken him this far, and, crucially, superior to those who had taken Bohemians, Drogs, Cork and Shels this far before now. And secondly, to again coax the best from them.
Should he manage it, Rovers can have genuine hopes of becoming the first Irish club to reach the group stages of European football. Otherwise, there’s the prospect of having one club who are too good for their domestic rivals, and not good enough for those from abroad. And it doesn’t get more unappetising than that.
Last weekend’s results
Premier Division:
Bray Wanderers 2-2 UCD
Drogheda United 0-4 Sporting Fingal
St Patrick’s Athletic 1-2 Dundalk
Shamrock Rovers 3-0 Galway United
EA Sports Cup Final:
Sligo Rovers 1-0 Monaghan United
This week’s fixtures:
Friday 1 October
Bohemians v Bray Wanderers, Dalymount Park, 7.45pm
Dundalk v Galway United, Oriel Park, 7.45pm
UCD v Shamrock Rovers, Belfield Bowl, 7.45pm
Saturday 2 October
St Patrick’s Athletic v Sporting Fingal, Richmond Park, 1pm – Live on RTE Two
Sligo Rovers v Drogheda United, The Showgrounds, 7.45pm
Tuesday 5 October
Bohemians v Shamrock Rovers, Dalymount Park, 7.05pm – Live on RTE Two
Drogheda United v St Patrick’s Athletic, Hunky Dorys Park, 7.45pm
Sligo Rovers v Bray Wanderers, The Showgrounds, 7.45pm
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