Drogheda are heading in right direction

SOCCER: Having started the season with the professed aim of bettering last season's performance, Drogheda United manager Paul Doolin looked to be in difficulty as he aimed, ahead of last Friday's FAI Cup quarter-final with Bohemians, to dampen down even the modest expectations he had generated at the start of the campaign.

Last November his side finished fourth in the league, 16 points behind champions Shelbourne, while the team also reached the semi-finals of the cup. This year the club are on course to wind up some 25 points off the top in fifth or sixth place.

The manager's relief at seeing his side dig in for a win over Bohemians in front of the club's biggest crowd of the season was easy to understand. Defeat would have meant the club had failed even to match last year's achievements on either of the two main fronts.

After bringing the club's spending to a point where it is probably only exceeded by Shelbourne's that would have been a bitter pill for Doolin to swallow.

Before the game there were suggestions from supporters and officials at other clubs that his position at Drogheda hung in the balance. The win, of course, put an end to any suggestion that the former Derry City and Shelbourne skipper would be on his way in the very near future.

However, his longer-term position seemed hard to question after United's directors subsequently expressed their faith in him in a manner that went some way farther than your standard vote of confidence.

Chris Byrne, a driving force behind the club's proposed move to a new stadium on a green-field site a mile and a half outside the town, and a man with some experience of what it is like to run a team, made no secret of his admiration for Doolin and his methods after the game.

Club chairman Vincent Hoey, whose involvement with the club goes back nearly half a century, echoed that support, insisting those behind the club's ongoing rise viewed the team's development, like that of United's home, as very much a work in progress.

Doolin is frank enough about the team's shortcomings, citing the number of goals conceded as well as the manner as their Achilles' heel.

The problem was apparent last year when United leaked more than a goal a game. What is more surprising is that after the acquisition, at a good deal of expense, of a new goalkeeper and what amounts to a whole new defence, the problem persists on almost precisely the same scale.

Those who witnessed Friday's 2-1 win will be a little baffled by the statistics as United defended their two-goal lead soundly after losing Paul Keegan to a second yellow card. Stephen Gray was well worth his man-of-the-match award and Graham Gartland, Damien Lynch and Simon Webb all played well too. The midfield pitched in with considerable spirit as Bohemians threw everything forward.

It was harder to gauge things at the other end where local hero Declan O'Brien, a recruit from non-league football when Harry McCue was still in charge, was largely isolated after the sending off of Keegan but there have been few complaints about either his performances or of those around him as scoring goals has not been a huge problem.

Defensively, Friday's display was all very different to the last meeting between the two sides when, at Dalymount in July, United surrendered a 2-1 lead with almost comical ease in the dying seconds.

It was a third consecutive league defeat and the slide has continued. Draws, some of them a little unlucky, have been more common than defeats and Hoey noted in his programme notes on Friday the team came into the game unbeaten in eight. More harshly, it might be pointed out they had managed just two wins in 11 games and one of those had been in the cup over old rivals Dundalk.

Drogheda's current steady rise, incidentally, is almost certainly bad news for their neighbours as Genesis are recommending a smaller top flight. Capital funding is likely to be directed towards the leading clubs in particular areas and the prospect of an Ireland league, which would hardly have room for two clubs from Louth, looks an increasingly realistic prospect.

Their poor run of form would be quickly forgiven if they manage to reach the cup final for the first time in almost 20 years while the team's league form would become an irrelevance in the event Doolin guided them to victory in December's decider. With a tough looking line-up for tomorrow's draw, however, there remains quite a bit of work to be done on that front.

In the longer term things look much brighter. In Hoey, Byrne, Eugene O'Connor and Jim McArdle the club appear to have assembled as able, ambitious and determined a group of directors as any club in the country. The new stadium development, though "at a delicate stage" and therefore not talked about too much just now, is to be located on a 50-acre site just off the M1 motorway.

The hope is to have other sports share the development. Athletics looks a likely partner while "the door is open to the GAA, we'd be delighted to have them, although they know their own minds and their plans might not necessarily fit in with ours", as Hoey puts it.

In addition to a stadium that will have an initial capacity of 8,000 to 10,000 with the potential for expansion, there will, it's hoped, be a large indoor sports arena. Revenue generated by commercial development of other parts of the site would help to secure United's long-term future and reduce the need for subsidy on the current scale.

It's a highly impressive scheme drawn up by people whose track records suggest they know what they're talking about. Drogheda's dramatic urban expansion provides the potential, they argue, and they mean to ensure United are able to fulfil it.

A glance at how relocations or major redevelopment schemes by Cork City, Shamrock Rovers and Limerick have failed to live up to the blueprints suggests, however, just as Doolin has some way to go with his team building, so his employers have a hard year ahead of them if their hopes of leaving United Park at the end of next season and leading the club to a bright new future are to be realised.