It's still Rovers' to lose, says Fenlon

AIRTRICITY LEAGUE PREMIER DIVISION: THE RESULT may have been welcome and the scoreline a major surprise but Bohemians boss Pat Fenlon says it will be a while yet before he takes the time to sit down with his players to watch the Oriel Park encounter between Dundalk and Shamrock Rovers.

“I haven’t had time and we’ve other things to think about just now but we might watch it before the Rovers game,” he said. “We’ve to play Dundalk too but to be fair, I wouldn’t say I’ll watch it before that one.”

The 5-1 defeat for Michael O’Neill’s men, combined with his own side’s win over Drogheda United, cuts the gap between the two remaining title contenders to just four points with six games remaining but Fenlon acknowledges the race remains Rovers’ to lose with his team needing to keep on winning simply to maintain the pressure on their rivals.

“Yeah, obviously, it’s still theirs to lose but we both have some tough games to play and I think what the last few weeks has shown is how quickly things can change in football: we were five or six points behind St Pat’s and now we’re ahead of them.

“Hopefully we can go on and overtake Rovers, too, but clearly it’s not going to be easy.

“What we do have going for us now is having almost everybody fit – I think last night was the first time I was able to name an unchanged side for almost a year – and a lot of belief, and that’s half the battle. We set ourselves some high targets recently and we’ve achieved them and that’s been a big help.

“Our away form had always been decent but we probably hadn’t been doing ourselves justice at home but we’ve seen that change a bit and if can keep it up then obviously we’re in with a shot. But we know we haven’t done anything like enough yet. We need to keep winning to keep the pressure on them.”

Fenlon admits he isn’t quite sure how much to read into Monday’s game. “They’ll be hoping it’s only a blip and that they’ll get back into their stride straight away while we’ll be hoping it’s a little bit more than that,” he said.

O’Neill, predictably, holds much the same view but the northerner is happy at least that his players can put the defeat behind them and shift their focus immediately to Friday’s cup game against Galway United in Tallaght.

“We have shown a wee bit of weakness that the other teams haven’t really seen,” he admitted, “and we have to make sure we respond to that positively. We have the cup game on Friday night and 11 days before we play again in the league. It’s like anything else, when you have a game like that the best thing you can have is a game. So we have to make sure that we are right for Friday night.”

Mention of last year’s run-in when Rovers let the title slip away, having done so well to get their noses in front of Bohemians, irks O’Neill slightly but he admits to being at least a little uncertain as to whether the experience will stand to or haunt his players as they look to maintain their lead this time around.

“We’ll know the answer in six weeks’ time,” he says. “It’s not a question I can answer with six games to go. To be fair, though, we came from behind last year. The idea that we threw the league away is not an opinion that I hold, it might be the opinion of other people.

“We finished the last season with 70-odd points which would have won you the league in nearly any of the last 20 years. I don’t look at that as a failure; I look at that as a positive.

“But it plays no factor in this season at all. Not in relation to the players, the new players. The new players at the club have not been through it so I don’t think it plays any factor at all.”

TITLE RUN-INS

Shamrock Rovers

September 24th: Galway United (H) October 1st:UCD (A) October 9th: Sporting Fingal (H)  October 15th: Bohemians (A) October 22nd: Drogheda United (H) October 29th: Bray Wanderers (A)

Bohemians

September 21st: Sligo Rovers (A) October 1st: Bray Wanderers (H) October 9th: St Patrick's Athletic (A) October 15th: Shamrock Rovers (H) October 22nd: Galway United (A) October 29th: Dundalk (H)