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Very true. saw a piece on Football focus about them not that long back. They have an impressive stadium considering their L2 status, I think its a 20k seater, but it was only built in the last few years, despite the fact that the club would do well to get 3k at a home game, so its no wonder they are in a financial and footballing mess.Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Darwin
Quote:
Originally Posted by elroy
Darlington are a very interesting club. My father has been a lifelong supporter since his days visiting his great-aunt who lived there back in the early 60s so I know quite a bit about how they're run.
The problem is that a millionaire owner took over, built a huge stadium on the outskirts of town. The team died because they used to play in a 4400 seater right in the middle of the town itself. Partly due to mismanagement and bad contracts, and partly due to the enormous operating costs of such a huge stadium, they've run into serious financial trouble.
They'll go down, be back up next year and back to averaging 4000 fans a game, more than enough to run a successful L2 club.
Tadgh Purcell is on pace to the be division's top goalscorer, if he had played the whole season with them, so there's hope yet.
Daniel McDonnell was on NewsTalk last night talking about this, he was at the last game at the Northern Arena
Click http://media.newstalk.ie/listenback/
Select Off The Ball
Tuesday 23rd March
Part 3
McDonnell's piece starts around the 32 minute mark
He had a 2 page article in yesterday's indo too. (I found it lying on a table in the UCD restaurant, honest.)Quote:
Originally Posted by tetsujin1979
i read that article - apparently they are only allowed 10,000 in their ground (despite capacity of 20,000 or so) as the roads around the ground are shocking... surely that could have been discovered prior to building the damn place!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by John83
the captain reckons the team amuse themselves by laughing at the irish lads trying to work the cd player... charming.
Quote:
Originally Posted by galwayhoop
If the Irish lads knew how to work the cd player then it wouldn't be a laugh?
Stan is finished as a manager after this, a nice guy but he is not cut out for management. Now that the u21 post is available I will bet he will apply for it and knowing the FAI he may well just get it.
darlington deserve what they get for hiring stan in the first place,shows how badly the club is run...when your team is bottom of the football league you need someone to come in with a bit of passion and charisma to motivate the players...i.e not steve staunton,good luck to them next season in the conference
Stan wouldn't make a good pundit sadly, I hope he has a future in the game but management is not his forte
I think his eagerness to be the top dog got him into the mess at Darlington - he should never have taken the job. Avram Grant does the same thing - following sinking ships around and putting himself in lose-lose situations - but he has decades of experience compared to Stan's 2 years.
I guess 2nd in the EPL, r-up in the LC with Chelsea, and before that being the most dominant coach in Israeli football before making their national team very hard to beat (won't call them cheats but Dudu......) is lose-lose. Every job is lose-lose if you're not up to it. Staunton was unlucky in a sense where he had a great first win and everyone got carried away. Meanwhile the media pundits were gunning for him - Dunphy and Giles stand up and take a bow, which meant the masses were going to react every time we did anything less than win 5-0. Worst of all was the fact that our arrogance ran away on us, apparently Cyprus just need to turn up to be beaten, same with any number of "minnows". And unless Trap starts with a bang in the first 3 games he'll be for the axe too!Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Darwin
Got to be a wind-up. "you tell me" was appointed by a person who I believe shoud have been kicked out of Irish football a long time ago. Stan's tenure IMO cost us not only qualification for 2008 but also cost us our place at 2010 (Trap had to sort out the losing mentality and lunacy of Stauton's tenure). We are SO LUCKY to have a man of integrity, football achievment and knowledge at our helm. Trap must have doubts about Delaney and co. And yet to his eternal credit he dismisses them to the back of his mind and remains our manager. And for that alone I am grateful.
Come on now Noely Stan has integrity. Dont hang the man. Many coaches are unsuccesful. It doesnt mean they are terrible people.
Crosby I have great respect for Stan. I stood on the terraces in Poznan when Stan sent over the perfect ball for Paul McGrath to head home in 1991. I am alluding to the chancer who runs Irish football. The guy who kept Givens in his job as u21 manager (2 years without a victory)and now has seen fit to give the guy a "uk scouting"role.
That is very questionable given that he did not have the itegrity to resign, rather wait for a large pay-out. He put himself before the organisation - not usually associated with integrity. He also put himself before his country.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crosby87
Took over a struggling side and kept them in the race for the title until the last day and got all the way to penalties in the Champions League final... and gets sacked for his troubles. How is that not lose-lose?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spudulika
Possibility of Staunton to Villa as some sort of assistant/manager in a 3 man "Dream Team"! Dream is not the word I would use.
http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/news...cle571059.html
Great gig if he gets it. Great player for Ireland but I can't see this working out.
On a memory lane off-topic moment, can anyone remember the match where staunton scored from a corner? Who was it against?
Link
During a friendly match against Portugal in Boston, USA, in June 1992, Steve Staunton scored directly from a corner kick. The Irish won the match 2-0.
Staunton repeated this feat in another competitive match against Northern Ireland less than a year later. On 31 March 1993 at Lansdowne Road the Republic of Ireland beat near neighbour 3-0 in a 1994 World Cup Qualifier. Stephen Staunton scored the Irish third goal in the 29th minute direct from a corner kick.
Thanks Wex!
Gone to Sunderland in a back room staff/scout capacity.
Pleased for the guy, even if it was his ties to Quinn that got him in there.Quote:
Originally Posted by CraftyToePoke
His corners were outrageous all right !
I believe Stephen McPhail also scored from a corner in one of those US Nike tournaments. Can't remember who against. Possibly South AfricaQuote:
Originally Posted by WexCar
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...ZZlDB3XZdVGQJg
Doesn't Steve kind of look like Damian Lewis from Homeland? And Band of Brothers?
Stan in a more natural element?
;)
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fb...type=1&theater
I agree the fella in the middle looks eerily similar to our Stan but the photo was actually taken at a rugby league game in New Zealand circa 1984 and depicts the famous Haka being performed. The football and caption were cleverly photoshopped in. Adept as they were, the pranksters neglected to remove the tree in the upper left background, which is unmistakably a Toatoa.
any links to the original photo?
I'm going to side with my faith in you and give you the benefit of the doubt with a 'thanks' for that.Quote:
Originally Posted by tetsujin1979
Doesn't the guy on the left slightly resemble Ray Houghton, probably about to perform a somersault or something?
This?Quote:
Originally Posted by tetsujin1979
http://brandnewretro.ie/2011/06/18/w...fc-semi-final/
Stan's photo looked original enough, maybe Tets was after the unedited original Rugby league game photo?
A "match assessor" ?? What did he do? Go down to the local Friendly Match or Safety Match factory and carry out quality control?Quote:
Originally Posted by gastric
Presumably he would go through the fixture list and stay stuff like, "Ah that's a tough one, and so's that one...and that one...Christ were gonna get relegated!!"Quote:
Originally Posted by OwlsFan
In an interview on BT Sport's Life's a Pitch last night, Staunton peddled a deluded line in claiming that "we achieved our goals ... set by the board" whilst he was in charge, but that a change in management was made as the achievement of those goals "obviously didn't appease the right people at the time". :bulgy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlM8JVTNwWI
Perhaps my memory fails me, but finishing third in our qualification group (ten points adrift of Germany in second place) surely wasn't one of the goals set by the FAI at the time, was it?
!0 points adrift is better than 14 points adrift.:)
One target was improved, we moved from 4th seeds in Euro 2008 Qual draw to 3rd seeds for the WC 2010 draw.
However that could also be read as a slide from 2nd seeds in WC 2006 qual draw to 3rd seeds in WC 2010 draw
Is anyone really fooling themselves that we wouldn't have been at least 10 points adrift with Trapattoni in charge?
We would be playing for a maximum of 10 points against Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Wales and any more than 9 would be a near miracle.
Who knows? Why omit Cyprus, the clearest direct benchmark for improvement? In Trap's first campaign we got 6 points from Cyprus versus one point a year earlier under Stan.
I think we could have got 6 points from Wales under Trap if Stan / Givens got 4. We tended to get 6 points against teams of that stature under Trap. The problem was first and second seeds.
Stan's best result was Slovakia at home. We should / could have beaten them home and away under Trap. The home game was a turgid bore but we should have won both.
The results weren't always terrible under Stan, but the performances were. 5-2 loss to Cyprus and coming within seconds of drawing 1-1 with San Marino are probably the two worst performances by an Irish team since the 80s.Quote:
Originally Posted by TheOneWhoKnocks
The Kazakhstan game was on a par with the San Marino game in a lot of aspects.Quote:
Originally Posted by Serb
The performances in the Trap era were just as disgraceful. We had no right to win against Georgia at home. We won because of bad refereeing. Who knows what the result against Armenia at home would have been if their goalkeeper hadn't been incorrectly sent-off. Who knows how we would have got on against Georgia "away" if we didn't get to play them in Mainz. The draw away to Russia in Moscow was an embarrassment. Good result on paper but the performance was a disgrace and we only got anything out of that game because of Dunne and Given.
Then there is the 1-6 loss at home to Germany in which Keogh netted a late consolation. That is up there in terms of the 5-2 loss away to Cyprus in my opinion.
Countries bigger (Portugal) than us have the odd freak result against teams worse than Cyprus.
Trapattoni was very, very lucky in his reign. I haven't even mentioned the first minute sending off for Pazzini in Bari. That is all well and good if you are getting lucky against teams like Italy and Russia, quite charming in fact but when you are getting lucky against teams like Georgia and Armenia... then I despair.
It didn't take long for us to get figured out though and here we are..
I dunno. I think there was a lot of self loathing going on in many quarters when Trap was being "lucky". I think people willfully overlooked the stonewall Doyle penalty not given at home to Georgia and the Andrews goal wrongly disallowed in the same game. And so what if Italy had a guy sent off? We got a point we didn't even need to secure second. We played well enough. Ten man Italy in Italy would still be favourites to beat us on Italy.
Armenia had their keeper rightly sent off, despite what he self loathers tried to say. We got a waxy own goal, no argument there. But given what Armenia did to Slovakia and Denmark I think we can take some credit for never even looking like we were having any trouble.
I think when a team of our stature qualifies or gets close to it there will have to be an element of luck to it. You take it when it comes. Nothing to moan about.
Stan is starting to look a little puffy.