Richardson turns his attention to Europe
Emmet Malone
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/spo...7SP2EMCOL.html
On Soccer: He might have been wiser to bask in the glory of it all a little longer but within minutes of seeing his Cork City side secure the club's first eircom League title in a dozen years, Damien Richardson was busy raising the bar, identifying success in Europe as his next big ambition.
Before then, of course, there is the small matter of the cup final but after so many years striving for the championship title that effectively secures his reputation and silences his critics, the fact is that Richardson's important work is already done for this year.
Whether the club can make sufficient progress between now and next summer to make any significant impact on the Champions League qualifiers remains to be seen. One hopes, of course, but all the evidence suggests that Richardson will have his work cut out.
City were wonderful to watch on Friday night as they dismantled the country's other outstanding side of the last nine months with a tremendous display of high tempo, attacking football and if they can muster performances of that quality in their early European games next July then it is not that hard, with a little luck in the draws, to see them progressing to the final qualifying round of UEFA's showpiece tournament.
As Shelbourne have learned in recent years, however, it doesn't take long before you notice a considerable leap in the quality of the opponents you meet on your European travels. Both Deportivo La Coruna and Lille, for instance, outclassed the Dubliners the year before last.
Pat Fenlon duly set about improving things and returned with a slightly bigger, significantly better squad this summer only to have Steaua Bucharest remind the then Irish champions a round earlier than might have been expected that they have a way to go yet.
Having accumulated so much valuable experience during their last few assaults on the continental big time it is a pity (no disrespect to Drogheda United intended) that the Tolka Park outfit are to be consigned to the Inter-Toto Cup in the wake of Friday's result at Turner's Cross.
If the league's ranking really is to be improved then there needs to be more than just one team each year winning games and neither United nor Derry bring much by way of experience or, one suspects, expectation to the UEFA Cup.
Cork's performance, though, will be the most important; not least because Shelbourne's relative success has resulted in many people here viewing the Champions League qualifiers as a barometer of the progress being made by our leading sides.
Being the best team in Ireland, even in a league that continues to improve, is not nearly enough to ensure the sort of results that would be viewed positively in Europe and Richardson, despite having been vague about the subject immediately after Friday's game, must know that he will need to strengthen and broaden his options if, as he said he does, he views Europe as, "the future".
Five players from the current squad - John O'Flynn, Neal Horgan, Liam Kearney, Colin O'Brien and Greg O'Halloran - are currently out of contract with the club and while the latter two started Friday's game on the bench, Richardson is reportedly interested in re-signing them all.
There would certainly be a logic to keeping a talented and generally young squad together and while O'Halloran has been linked with a move to Shelbourne, it's worth remembering that the former under-21 international played some his best football this season on the very stage that Richardson says is the one that matters. Against Djugardens in Sweden O'Halloran was superb and his omission from the team that lost to Slavia in Prague in the next round was probably the greatest miscalculation of Richardson's year.
Still, if ostensibly peripheral players like O'Halloran are to be retained (and can be persuaded to stay) then the squad can only be improved if it is also expanded and it remains to be seen how much freedom the manager is given in this regard.
Previous Cork City managers have found it difficult to persuade particular players at the top end of the market to come south when there is competition from the big Dublin clubs and it is not clear how much room for further progress there is in terms of prioritising the recruitment of players with strong local links - an approach also adopted by Stephen Kenny to good effect at the Brandywell - until the club's youth, scouting and development structures are all dramatically improved.
Richardson is hopeful that the title success, and all that goes with it, will make money a little easier to come by for the club but, as Shelbourne have discovered this year, it takes no more than a brief loss of form for the flaws in a business model based on perpetual success at home to be exposed.
Now, having displaced their old rivals as the country's best team, Cork too have to decide whether that is enough for them because if it is not, far from marking the end of a 12-year journey, then Friday's memorable win over Derry is only the start of something potentially as long and at least as difficult again.
© The Irish Times
