Dalymount: better dead than not black 'n' red
Eeny, meeny, miney, mos/
Follow Shels or follow Bohs?
It's not supposed to be like that. It might work with Tolka teenies, but Dalymount just has history.
Anyway, if Bohs sold up and moved out of the holy ground there would be no need for sharing with Shels. A disaster in my view, but still the least worst option.
We need to think about this politically and strategically, and not just financially, in terms of where our next set of floodlights comes from. This country is awash with money.
If Bohs members told FAI and the government to fund top-flight football properly, as part of a long-term battle to win recognition for the domestic game, there would be no need for sharing with Shels. That might be a long and painful haul, but so would ground-sharing. I'd prefer to hobble along and take my chances.
Even if I philosophically accepted a partial surrender to the dark side, for the good of the club, which it's emphatically not, I'd be less inclined to haul myself down to Dalyer of a Friday evening and I'm sure others would feel the same. The magic, in all its dingy, rusting, glorious authenticity, would be gone. And I say that as a relatively recent Jodi-dweller.
All of this ground-share/league re-organization is a figment of some cheap suit's spreadsheet-driven imagination. It is entirely artificial, yet the whole discussion, both here and in the media, treats it as if it were some universal truth that Dalymount is no longer viable. People who espouse this argument are forgetting the scale of public investment in other sports and accepting sheep-like, as the FAI apparently does, that football will always be the poor relation when it comes to public investment. It's as if every time they walked up Jones's Road all they saw was blue sky.
This charade is actually an interesting exercise in political and media manoeuvring. So far, Delaney and FAI are playing a blinder, with vigorous applause from the sticks, and coverage so uncritical you'd think every hack on the case was in line for a private suite. It makes you wonder if everything else the great and good of our media firmament cover is done in such a superficial and unthinking way.