Deal that works both ways at Santry

It would be nice to believe that Sunday was a sort of turning point in the somewhat turbulent recent history of Shamrock Rovers FC. Their game, in front of some 1,200 spectators at their latest temporary home, Morton Stadium, generated little of the excitement of their opening fixture at the RDS a few years back but perhaps in years to come more significance will be attached to it than is now to the start of their brief tenure out in Ballsbridge.

For that to happen Sunday will have to go down as the beginning of the end of the club's days in the wilderness. The talk about getting the move to Tallaght sorted out by the end of September will have to be nailed down and the long-suffering supporters, many of whom have become understandably sceptical about the club's insistence that the new home is just around the corner, will need to be shown some concrete evidence.

If this happens then next few months out in Santry may well be enjoyable ones for the Hoops and their fans. The stadium may be far from ideally placed in terms of either the club's historical fan base or the one which it is intending to cultivate but it can be a home, a temporary one that is, in a way which Tolka Park never could have been to Rovers.

Club chairman Joe Colwell is quick to express his gratitude to Shelbourne for helping them out so many times over the course of some difficult times but he admits that the problems of renting somebody else's pitch for games were exacerbated considerably by the fact that the landlords were such close rivals.

The practical difficulties in terms of co-existence were many but even they were overshadowed most of the time by the difficulty which presents itself every time rent day comes around and you have one club handing over significant amounts of its income over to another. "It was," as Colwell says now "like saying to them "here you are, go on off and buy yourselves a couple of new players to beat us with."

So, getting out of Tolka was a priority and in Santry Colwell, Damien Richardson and all of the players appear to have landed on their feet. It was a little strange to find yourself watching a National League game across an athletics track. That, like Athlone's brief flirtation with three centre backs last week, somehow seems like something best left to the continentals and with only a thousand or so people watching the additional space certainly has a negative impact on the atmosphere within the ground.

That's sort of where the problems end, though, for the spectator facilities at Santry are pretty good. It would be nice to have more than 800 seats but the terracing and banking around the rest of the ground is good and the view of the game provided from just about anywhere is excellent.

Rovers suddenly find themselves with just about the best dressing rooms in the league, some of the best toilet facilities and better car parking than any of the other big Dublin clubs. The whole place looks like it might be a little exposed on some of

winter's less forgiving afternoons but then there are plans too to cover the main terrace.

The playing surface isn't bad either although improvements are planned for the coming month or so. After Sunday's game Richardson admitted that the cut of the grass mightn't be ideal for footballing purposes and both managers felt that the pitch should be bigger. Thanks to the enthusiastic co-operation of Fingal County Council, however, the surface is being worked on and alterations to the athletics facilities due to be made over the coming weeks, will allow for an expansion of the pitch in both directions.

Fingal's support for Rovers is, in fact, something that augers well for the future of the stadium as a National League ground.

The council's intention to gradually develop the stadium into a widely recognised multi-sport arena made Rovers look like attractive tenants. A high profiled tenancy would be bound to have a positive knock on effect, went the thinking, and the purchase for Sunday's game of new goalposts, a gesture that cost the council around £1,000, gives a hint of the strength of the desire for the whole thing to work out well over the course of the one season agreement.

After that, all things going to plan, Rovers should be off on their bikes to Tallaght. Assuming their building agreement with the council is signed next month, as it is supposed to be, the granting of the lease shouldn't be far behind, and after that it should, and this is where we admittedly venture into the realm of the theoretical, all be plain sailing.

The turning of a sod out by the Square would be the sort of definite signal that might help the club to generate interest amongst their future neighbours and Colwell is confident that, even as it is, if the club does well then the demand will be such that they will be running considerably more than the couple of buses they ran across the city on Sunday.

It might be too much to ask that the club would actually win something yet. It's not so much that they were flattered by the margin of victory over Finn Harps on Sunday, more a case of Harps hardly having been insulted by it. Afterwards Richardson admitted that he feels there is still a long way to go and that when things settle down after a slightly erratic opening couple of weeks the squad he has now would do well to stay with the pacemakers.

If the club are in their new home next year he will hope to be closer to having a panel capable of genuinely challenging for honours and Rovers will, at last, be in a position to face into the future with some degree of certainty again. Sadly, due to the restrictions on their development in Tallaght they will be starting their new life in a considerably less impressive home than the one they currently occupy. But with rumours about Drumcondra and Home Farm Fingal getting together its difficult not to see the name Morton Stadium featuring in the league's fixture lists for some time to come.