Damien Duff’s decision to become Shelbourne manager is a brave one because it’ll put his reputation on the line like never before.
he high-profile coaching jobs Duff held with Celtic and Ireland might have been demanding, but management is entirely different. This time the buck will stop with him and his stature within the game will mean he’s subjected to unusually intense scrutiny for a League of Ireland manager.
Everyone will want to see if Duff can cut it as a boss. And quite a few people will expect him to be an instant success. Surely the League of Ireland will be easily enough worked out by someone who spent his career at much higher levels?
It doesn’t always work out like that. The fate of Duff’s old Blackburn Rovers and Ireland teammate Jeff Kenna should serve as a warning that cross-channel achievement doesn’t automatically translate to domestic success.
Kenna’s first season as a League of Ireland manager with Galway United in 2008 was hailed as a major success. Galway, it was argued, were so weak that in enabling them to avoid relegation by a single point the new boss had worked a minor miracle.
This seemed a dubious enough contention at the time and looked even sillier when within a couple of seasons five members of that Galway squad, Gary Rogers, Alan Keane, John Russell, Séamus Conneely and Iarfhlaith Davoren were playing key roles in a Sligo Rovers side which went on to win a league title and three FAI Cups.
Kenna had benefited from something which may help Duff out in his early days at Shelbourne. People were so keen to see a big name succeed in the League of Ireland they overpraised his actual achievement.
Kenna took charge of St Pat’s the following season but his reign proved to be a disaster. Pat’s, who’d finished runners-up the previous season, were flirting with relegation when Kenna was sacked after just nine months. He hasn’t managed since.
Brian Kerr described Duff last week as the “highest profile person to come back and get involved in Irish football since Johnny Giles”.
It was 1977 when Giles arrived at Shamrock Rovers and announced that he was going to bring a new level of professionalism to the League of Ireland and build a team capable of challenging for European honours.
Giles was Ireland manager at the time and had just steered West Brom to seventh place in the English top flight. With him he brought Paddy Mulligan and Ray Treacy, then Ireland internationals who’d been with him at West Brom, and another experienced cross-channel operator in Eamon Dunphy. They couldn’t disguise their conviction that the League of Ireland was there for the taking.
Read More
Yet in six seasons at Milltown, the only thing Giles won was the 1978 FAI Cup. That proved to be the only time a team predicted to challenge for European honours even managed to qualify for Europe.
Dunphy has argued that Rovers were undone by the flawed nature of the League itself. But the truth is that Giles was unable to get the better of some very astute managers, Billy Young at Bohs, Turlough O’Connor at Athlone and Jim McLaughlin at Dundalk.
Not till McLaughlin took over the Hoops a few months after Giles’ departure did they finally began to enjoy the real success which had been predicted for them. McLaughlin’s league three in a row, including two doubles, showed the advantage of having a manager with experience of the League of Ireland’s particular demands.
It seems counter-intuitive that someone with Giles’ record in the game was unable to succeed in the League of Ireland. But time and again the League has proved a tougher nut to crack than outsiders might have anticipated.
The new Shels boss might take heart from the example of one returnee whose time at the helm here proved to be a spectacular success. No fanfare accompanied the arrival of Eoin Hand in 1979 to manage Limerick United after a dozen years playing in the English lower division with Portsmouth.
Yet within a year a Limerick side who’d finished sixth the previous season had won only the second league title in their history. Their victory propelled Hand into the Irish manager’s job where he narrowly failed to qualify for the 1982 World Cup Finals. He had to be content instead with winning the 1982 FAI Cup with Limerick as, like Giles, he combined the roles of international and League of Ireland management.
Earlier on, Shay Brennan managed Waterford to a league title just three years after winning a European Cup with Manchester United. Damien Richardson’s achievement while winning a title with Cork City and FAI Cups with Shels, after beginning his managerial career with Gillingham, is also worthy of note.
Duff may see the Shelbourne job as a possible springboard to international management after Stephen Kenny and Michael O’Neill followed Hand’s lead. The League has proved a useful training ground for ambitious managers with Sam Allardyce, Lawrie Sanchez, Steve Cotterill, Ian Baraclough and Paul Cook all going on to bigger things.
But if the success of these tyros seemed to illustrate the advantage of a lengthy professional career for a League of Ireland manager, the recent fate of Kevin Sheedy, sacked after just nine games in charge of Waterford, shows another side of the coin.
Sheedy lasted two more games than his fellow Everton great Andy King did in 1989. Another Evertonian, Derek Mountfield, was lucky to last six months with Cork City in 2000.
The brief managerial careers of John Dempsey and John Hewitt at Dundalk, Kenny Clements at Limerick and Trevor Hockey at Athlone Town offer further warnings against equating on field achievement with off field acumen.
Duff is a much more impressive character and appears to be in management for the long haul. Yet his debut season will see him put under the microscope. Given Duff’s liking for the punchy quote, that attention is unlikely to diminish as the season wears on.
Meanwhile, old hands like Stephen Bradley, Stephen O’Donnell, Liam Buckley and Keith Long will relish the chance to show him just how difficult managing here actually is. The League of Ireland just got a lot more interesting.
Roll on next season — 2022 will be The Year Of The Duffer.
Can Conte restart Alli’s engine or are his best years already in past?
Dele Alli’s loss of form may be the most catastrophic, prolonged and inexplicable in the history of the Premier League.
Just four years ago Alli was perhaps the best young midfielder in the world. At 21 he’d won two Young Player of the Year awards and appeared on two successive Premier League Teams of the Season.
When Alli had a slow start to the 2018-19 season, Mauricio Pochettino assured everyone it was temporary. Instead the slump has continued.
A player who scored 22 goals in the 2016-17 season and contributed 14 assists in 2017-18 has managed just 16 goals and 15 assists in the last three seasons while looking a desperately diminished figure.
Once expected to be the cornerstone of the England midfield for years Alli hasn’t played for his country since 2019 while his lassitude has contributed to Pochettino, Jose Mourinho and Nuno Espirito Santo losing their jobs.
A player who once rivalled Harry Kane as Spurs’ greatest asset has turned into a major liability.
Can Antonio Conte return the falling star to his former glory? A rejuvenated Alli would be like a new signing. It’s hard to believe that at 25 his best days are already behind him.
Irish team reflects poorly on IRFU’s development
Isn’t it bizarre that yesterday’s Ireland starting XV against Japan didn’t contain a single player born in Munster or Ulster?
The team contained 12 from Leinster, two from Munster and one from Connacht. But the two Munster players, Andrew Conway and Tadhg Beirne, come from Dublin and Kildare respectively and began their careers in the Leinster academy. Connacht’s representative Bundee Aki is from New Zealand although the West did have one native starter in Ballina’s Caelan Doris.
Aki’s presence along with that of James Lowe and Jamison Gibson-Park means there were as many New Zealand-born players in the squad as Munster born ones. Finlay Bealham’s selection means Australia had as many representatives as Ulster and Connacht.
It’s a far cry from a dozen years ago when Ireland’s Grand Slam winning side contained eight starters from Munster. These days the Irish team is largely Leinster, an awful indictment of the IRFU’s development elsewhere.
By contrast the Ireland women’s soccer team which recently beat Finland and the men’s side which defeated Azerbaijan both contained players from all four provinces.