Bohemians sharpshooter aims for a clean sweep

It's been a hectic start to the month for Bohemians striker Glen Crowe. The league's leading scorer by a considerable distance, he was again doing what he does best over the past week or so, scoring in Longford last Wednesday and then on Sunday in Kilkenny where the couple of goals he scored helped his team to clinch the league championship. Not a bad week's work, eh?

But then there are the awards. A couple of weeks ago the 23-year-old was named as the PFAI's player of the year and on Thursday night he completed his very own double when he picked the corresponding award from the football writers. With only tomorrow's Harp Lager FAI Cup final to go, the young Dubliner is on the verge of a clean sweep and having spent his fair share of time in the shadows, it's clear that he's acquired a taste for his new found success.

Primarily, though, Crowe says that he is just happy to be playing and happy, most of all, to be scoring goals. Thirty-five of them he's scored in all competitions this year which, after some rough times in England where he ended up being faced with a potentially endless round of trials in order to earn a half-decent contract, has reminded him what it was that got him involved in football to begin with.

"It's why I started playing the game, to score goals" he says, "right from the start I knew that I wouldn't enjoy it nearly as much if I had to be a midfielder or a defender."

Fortunately for him, he quickly proved to have a knack for it and now, after a blistering season at Dalymount Park, he displays all the quiet contentment of a man who is recognised as being among the best at his trade.

Still, he says, he continues to develop as a player. While he puts much of his own success over the past nine months down to the fact that virtually the whole Bohemians squad has been training together on a full-time basis this season, he also admits that he has made some progress in terms of his own game.

"In terms of my game outside the box, link up play, positioning and all of that I'd say I can still learn quite a lot from coaching. There's other things I could improve too, like heading the ball, I could score more goals with my head.

"But inside the box I think even if I was to be taught something by a coach I'd still end up doing my own thing because I think what I do in around the goal comes fairly naturally to me."

For some of Bohemians' rivals it is that natural ability around the box that has been the difference between Roddy Collins's side and the rest. Take even half of Crowe's 25 league goals out of the equation and, for a start, Shelbourne would almost certainly still be champions.

Crowe himself, though, believes that the team had enough strength in all of the key areas to justify their championship success, something he feels they showed back before Christmas when his goalscoring touch deserted him for a while and others were struggling to find their best form too but, between them, the team repeatedly did enough to take something away from games.

"For eight or nine games I went through a bad spell but we were grinding out results and that was important.

"I think if we'd lost the league we'd be sitting there looking back at the couple of weeks when we dropped points to Galway, Harps and Cork and thinking, well, they were the games when we let it slip away. Now I'd say that that run before Christmas was probably where we won it because we showed we were good enough to hang in there when we weren't playing well at all."

A cup success could similarly be attributed in part to having beaten Shamrock Rovers at the semi-final stage without really starting to play at all. Crowe and his team-mates would doubtless settle for repeating the trick tomorrow, although after providing us with such a nailbiting finish to the league, the rest of us have come to expect a lot more than that from the Dalymount Park outfit.

Sunday's game will be broadcast live on Net 2 (kick-off 3.30) while Radio 1 is carrying live commentary of both of the weekend's cup finals.