Bradley needs to start making progress at Shamrock Rovers
John Fallon
February 23 2018, 12:01am, The Times
Late on Wednesday night, in his role of RTÉ pundit, Damien Duff didn’t equivocate when supplying a frank assessment of his former mentor José Mourinho’s tenure at Manchester United but closer to home there is a tenancy that is also attracting its share of analysis.
Stephen Bradley is certainly no Mourinho, yet the tradition and fanbase of Shamrock Rovers make them Ireland’s version of United.
Both managers are in their second full season at the helm and while the Portuguese realises his record of 25 trophies and €350 million net transfer-market spend at a club carries the burden of expectation, Bradley must also accept that second is considered insufficient.
Compounding the challenge for the 33-year-old is the fact that third is their more likely placing in the League of Ireland order and there is no guarantee it will wash.
Tonight’s visit of Dundalk, only their second game of the season, is already been deemed a match that they cannot lose.
Granted, rookie managers tend to be afforded some slack, but last week’s capitulation in the 3-1 defeat by Bohemians, coupled with the party line circulating from Tallaght, threaten to make this a testing season for the local manager raised in nearby Fettercairn.
“We have to understand where we are,” Bradley said last week. “John Caulfield, Stephen Kenny and Kenny Shiels have been there four or five seasons with their squads.”
Not true. Kenny did take over at Dundalk for the 2013 season, Caulfield returned to Cork a year later but the first game of Shiels era at Derry came in March 2016. That is just four months before Bradley was installed as caretaker manager at Rovers in succession to the sacked Pat Fenlon.
“We just need to recognise that last year we made great progress and this year we need to try and better that again,” the Rovers manager said. “That just means closing the points gap on Cork and Derry because they’re ahead of the rest and we’ve to try fight and make it hard for them.”
Progress? It was the word Duff used in referencing Mourinho — contending that there had been none — and there is little evidence to indicate that the team for whom he is on the backroom staff have either.
At the end of his first, albeit half, season, Bradley’s side finished fourth, a full 22 points adrift of champions Dundalk.
Last year, having recruited heavily in the off-season, they leapfrogged Derry into third spot.
However, the gap on the top two remained unchanged.
Cork enjoyed that 22-point buffer and Dundalk, like the Leesiders in the previous season, accumulated 15 points more. This was at the end of a campaign in which reducing the deficit constituted their main target.
Despite this being early days, it is perhaps natural for Bradley to be less bullish on the topic of catching the trailblazers, especially after many of the top-level players that he wanted to enlist opted against moving.
Even the restrained Kenny seemed to take satisfaction by claiming his rivals “threw the kitchen sink” at attempting to lure his right back, Sean Gannon, to Dublin recently, along with Brian Gartland, the centre back.
The ploy had certainly worked 12 months previously when Ronan Finn, another of their mainstays in the surge to the Europa League group stage, made the switch but other, riskier captures disappointed.
For example, two more arrivals from Dundalk, Darren Meenan and Michael O’Connor, are not even in this year’s squad, while Ryan Connolly wasn’t retained after a year.
The Mayo man was presented as one of the “four young captains” on the same day last year but Daniel Devine departed by mutual consent midway through the season and Paul Corry’s injury problems eventually forced him to retire.
Only Roberto Lopes remains of that quartet and he will need to deliver an improved display at centre back to that shown against his former club Bohemians seven days ago.
He wasn’t alone in culpability at Dalymount Park, as the two full backs, Ethan Boyle and Ally Gilchrist, endured challenging debuts.
New signing Sean Kavanagh, in spite of his lack of first-team action, may replace Gilchrist at left back tonight but questions surrounding the decision to ditch Simon Madden, the right back, in the off-season for 21-year-old Boyle, a former Finn Harps midfielder, will linger for far longer. Fans’ favourite Madden was described by his manager as the best right back in the league only 12 months earlier when Cork starting sniffing around him.
Regardless of the personnel, what seemed most disconcerting on the opening night was the one-dimensional tactics adopted against a part-time Bohemians outfit. Aiming to exploit full backs by firing long balls in behind can have merit, only it was clearly ineffective from early in the game.
Rovers, too, are seen by the Football Association of Ireland as instrumental to its strategy of introducing a technically-based programme across the new under-age national leagues.
Since lifelong fan, Ray Wilson, and Pepper Group’s Seumas Dawes invested in the club two years ago to the tune of €1.5 million, much of the emphasis has centred on developing home-produced talent at their training ground in Kingswood and the governing body chipped in themselves with a €180,000 grant towards the facility’s construction costs in September.
Their endeavours to bring about change were highlighted by a social-media campaign during the downtime of Christmas, showing video clips of children exhibiting their skills around the streets of Dublin.
The “Football Loves Us” hashtag went global, helped by the presence in the footage of Duff, the under-15 squad head coach.
Now that definitely represented an example of progress.
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