Cork find themselves looking for favours

It was a strange kind of week with five of the six matches in the top flight ending in draws, but it's has been another revealing period for the managers of teams in the top half of the Premier Division.

Only St Patrick's Athletic managed to pick up three points which, if Cork City had any serious rivals for second place, might at least offer some comfort to them after Sunday's draw at Tolka Park.

Dave Barry remains optimistic that his side can still win the league and he may be right, but what's sure now is that in contrast to the start of January when City were in a commanding position, he now needs favours from his team's main rivals. And Liam Buckley's men haven't been feeling too generous of late.

On Sunday there were a few reasons to suspect that Cork wouldn't manage to take all three points from their game with Shelbourne. The manner in which they had been beaten the previous week by St Patrick's must have had an effect on morale within the side and that was always going to be difficult to brush aside so quickly.

Also the balance which the side had last season when Ollie Cahill and Colin O'Brien were playing out wide doesn't appear to have been recaptured since the latter's return from long-term injury. One other minor problem was the continued absence, until late in the game, of Mark Herrick, who was still being rested.

For all that, City should have won the game after they led 3-1 with 10 minutes remaining. But they became unsettled as Pat Scully pushed forward and Tony Sheridan dropped into midfield, passed up a chance to go 4-1 up and then conceded a terribly soft goal to allow Shelbourne back into the game. By the time Scully equalised in the final minute of regular time, his team deserved their point. The southerners now find themselves under pressure to grind out the wins over the next six weeks. If they don't they are likely to travel to Inchicore in mid-April desperately needing all three points.

Cork may have slipped up over the past couple of months (two points from their last three games and three from their last four outings before Christmas are hardly the sort of runs that win championships) but the fact that they are still 15 points clear of the third-placed team in the table says a fair bit about the strength of the would-be challengers.

After Sunday's game, Dermot Keely described the next best sides - Rovers, Harps and his own Shelbourne were the ones he mentioned by name - as being "flair" teams, clubs that possess a fair few talented players but lack the sort of ability that the top two have demonstrated for knocking out wins in unpromising circumstances.

The problems of the challengers differ from team to team. It's a little obvious to say that they aren't scoring enough while they're conceding too many. If, though, you take a look at Rovers, who occupy third place in the table, they have let in just four goals fewer than bottom-placed Waterford United.

If they are going to be that soft at the back, then they are going to have to be pretty sharp up front, but on Friday night in Richmond Park, when for the second time in four weeks they were ripped apart by a team that knew precisely how to expose their weaknesses, they could come up with nothing to threaten the home side. For Harps, a draw in Derry will be viewed as a decent enough result, while one of the more interesting things about Shelbourne salvaging a point on Sunday was that for those closing 10 minutes, when the Dubliners were clearly on top, every one of the players on the pitch were players who had been there last season.