In a move which I think will surprise many, UCD have decided to put a tamagochi in charge for the rest of the season. I hope they remember to feed him.
https://www.thesun.ie/sport/football...collie-oneill/
Edit: I may have misread this initially.
None as yet, but the last three times we needed a manager, the assistant was promoted (Martin Russell was Pete's assistant, Aaron was Martin's assistant, and Collie was Aaron's assistant).
That'd be Ian Ryan I think, but that's not a guarantee at all of course.
In a move which I think will surprise many, UCD have decided to put a tamagochi in charge for the rest of the season. I hope they remember to feed him.
https://www.thesun.ie/sport/football...collie-oneill/
Edit: I may have misread this initially.
#NeverStopNotGivingUp
Harsh if UCD sacked O'Neill considering all the upheaval in the playing squad. That said Maciej seems to be a good coach from his couple of spells at Bray when they were in disarray. Wouldnt mind having Collie O'Neill on the coaching staff at Dundalk especially as part of a youth development project!
considering hes out of the loop considerably would Paul Doolin swallow his pride and go back to his first love managerial wise?
Gary Cronin is he the right man to manage Longford Town?
That didn’t take long. UCD have a new manager.
Absolutely fascinating chat with Collie on loi weekly. UCD board sound like an awful bunch to work for. Collie was being diplomatic too.
The board seeming to think they had a right to have an opinion on the formation and style of play is real Saturday league stuff....
Irish by birth ,Harps by the grace of god.
Who was the player he was talking about that he dropped?
Here on a technicality.
Well, if we look at the four players dropped for the Waterford match, and then rule out those whose father isn't on the club board....
Seems like a bit of stroke by UCD on UCD FC. They pay 100K a year and get their name out their and the prestige of having a senior side in the doemstic league etc. It comes across as a sort of advertising or does the college offer additional support in terms of logistics, expertise , facilities ?
Well they supply all the training pitches gyms and the stadium (such as it is).
If all the players are on scholarships thats 20 places not available to sell to other applicants, foreign students etc
Maintenance and repairs to the stadium (ground-staff etc) must be a fairly serious cost.
Is the managers salary out of that 100k or is he employed by UCD?
The football club board come across in the interview as being eejits but id say the college are making a decent contribution to be fair to them.
i'd say the actual college board are'nt enjoying this spat, the football board would want to settle down
Last edited by sbgawa; 05/09/2019 at 1:10 PM.
The club get the Bowl and training pitches. Players have access to the UCD gym, at least some definitely have access to the high performance gym which is top class but I don't know if that's a deal with the football club or a scholarship thing or even if all players have access to the high performance gym and not just the standard. That's about it as far as I'm aware. It's a lot but nothing overly generous.
While I'm sure the UCD football club board mean well their treatment of collie is reminiscent of a schoolboy club and they seem a bit commercially naive.
The player was the no.2 keeper. O’Neill got an easy ride on the podcast. He’s treated some players like &@&@ and no board member resigned!!
You can't spell failure without FAI
The likelihood is that there's two sides to the story, and the truth lies somewhere in between.
I don't know what happened exactly, and as I know the three apparently key players (Collie, the board member and the player), I'm not going to speculate, but I will say it's a real pity that 9 years has ended in what seems to be an acrimonious fashion.
I think it's also worth noting the podcast comments that a Premier Division club should have x number of non-amateurs. This is a daft suggestion which I'm surprised at Ward and, particularly, McDonnell making.
Obviously a UCD side getting hammered isn't great for the league. But UCD being so poor - and yet better than all the First Division teams kind of by definition - isn't the problem to be addressed. It's just a symptom of the real issue, which is how utterly mismanaged and undersupported the league is.
If the FAI put money into the league rather than skim off its top, then you'd find either (a) other teams would improve and we'd stay down or (b) UCD would retain players beyond graduation and have a decent squad, like in the 00s when you had Alan Mahon, Alan McNally, Tony McDonnell, Mick O'Donnell, etc, staying with us for 10 years and more.
Everything O'Neill said on the podcast was consistent with what I was hearing about his sacking. He was under pressure to play a goalkeeper who is the son of a long-term UCD committee member who had been dropped in favour of an another inexperienced back-up keeper who also struggled and the situation blew up with the 10-1 defeat
Of course sometimes there are two sides to every story and sometimes there is only one. I'd be surprised if O'Neill had been treating players like &@&@ all of sudden into a long LOI career as coach and manager.
The Leinster Senior League needs a strong Bohemians
True, but that's no reason not to have a rational analysis of it.
Being paid for pre-season - or having a certain number of non-amateurs - is all very well, but where's the money going to come from? I get that the PFAI's role is to get more money for its members, but they live in a fairy world at times.
Until we grasp the nettle of the FAI leeching money from the league rather than trying to generate money for it, then you're going to have a club like UCD losing players regularly, or the goings-on in Athlone or Limerick.
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