Ok... I missed it. No apologies, I put my girlfriend first, spent the weekend in Cork and missed my first home game in 15 months. Everybody that I've spoken to has said we were crap though. Even people who are normally quite supportive of the club in general have wasted no time in telling me that we were never at the races.
So now after all the promise shown in the first half of the season we're languishing third from bottom in the table. This is a tight division and we can argue that we deserved more from some games but overall this season has to be considered a failure. The point raised below by Lims Fan has to be addressed - the money issue.
Last season we spent less money than other club in the league and accordingly we finished last. By spending less money on our team than every other club in the league we aimed to finish last and pulled off that feat with a degree of style. This year we seem to have increased our budget slightly and accordingly we're ahead of a miserly Kilkenny City and the other 'local' club Athlone Town (although after tomorrow night that may change). There's no easy answers to get the club in gear money-wise, I'm not going to even get into that now but I think everybody would agree that it's not easy. We need to sort it out though because otherwise we're finished, we'll be thrown out of the league in 2004 and that'll be it for senior football in Limerick.
Last Friday night I went to see Cork City Vs. Bray Wanderers. Cork won 3-1 and could have had more. Cork has a population of somewhere in the region of 120,000 to Limerick's 80,000. Our home gate of 200ish pales considerably in relation to the 3,000 odd I saw at Turner's Cross. Cork are organised on and off the pitch. Their programme puts ours to shame but retails at the same price... It beggars belief that Cork (even with their bigger population and Premier League status) can draw fifteen times as many people to their games as we can. Senior football in Limerick can survive but Limerick FC need to fulfill all the promises made at the fans forum and more. Why bother arsing about for a first division license? Let's just go for a Premier license or have we any intention of promotion any time soon? When will the club start to market itself around the city and county? Why do Cobh and Kilkenny get huge amounts of young supporters while we're down to a crew of die-hards?
Most disappointing of all the stories I heard was the constant petty arguments that seemed to characterise last Sunday's defeat. Fans sniping at fans, fans sniping at management, committee sniping at fans. Are we or are we not all on the same side here? I'm not a member of the "O'Connor Out Crowd", I think Noel showed with the Under-21s that if he's given the proper resources he'll get results. At the same time, I agree with a lot of the points made by Lims Fan here, not the attacks he used to make on people before, but a lot of what he says is firmly grounded in reality. He clashed with one of our fans on Sunday, fair enough, two guys with different and strongly-held views. What I found pathetic was the fact that people almost fell over backwards to laugh at Lims Fan afterwards. Why? Because they hadn't the bottle to answer him back themselves? This kind of hide-your-head-in-the-sand mentality is the big problem at Limerick FC. Only a handful of people actually air their grievances. There's a lot of mistrust built up between board and fans (remember they labeled me a trouble-maker?). Well let's sort it out, there seemed to be genuine good will once all the old farts took off at the Fan Forum, let's build on that, it's ridiculous that this forum is being used to air these grievances at all. Let's be constructive, have reasoned arguments and discussions and all grow up a bit. Everybody is entitled to an opinion and most if not all of the threads here start with a well-presented, well-structered post. Then the bitching starts... It's getting boring people, let's remember once and for all that we're on the same side! Let's try and build our club up again.
