Managers start to feel pinch of progress

Amid the current development of the League of Ireland, and possibilty of an all-Ireland league, clubs are under more pressure to have the right man in charge, writes Emmet Malone

IN CONTRAST to the relative calm of last season, the dismissal of Tony Cousins by Galway United just four games into the new campaign has bolstered the widely held belief that this will be an especially difficult year for the League of Ireland's top-flight managers.

Cousins becomes the first casualty of the season and the timing certainly makes it hard not to feel sorry for the Dubliner.

Still, as they discussed the reasoning behind their decision yesterday it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the determination of clubs to avoid being one of the three teams to be relegated from a 12-team Premier Division, combined with the jockeying for position prompted by the sense that an all-Ireland league has become something of an inevitability, will ensure that other managers will be shown the door during the months ahead.

United's chairman, John Fallon, insisted last night that the deliberations on whether or not to replace Cousins had in fact been ongoing since towards the tail-end of last season. A remarkable run of 11 home games without a win served to undermine the young manager's position and only the dramatic improvement in the team's form late on - which produced four victories in the last six games at Terryland Park - persuaded the club's directors to keep faith with him.

The manager was, Fallon argues, well supported during the close season as he looked to improve the squad assembled the previous year and the expectation was that the team would be capable of achieving a top-half-of-the-table finish this time around.

"I think Tony would have accepted that that was a realistic prospect," says Fallon, "and I think he would have to admit that one point and one goal from four games is not the sort of form you need to be producing if you are going to achieve that. Already, in a year when the bottom three sides go down, we were looking at a situation where some of the clubs we would have expected to be ahead of come November were getting a bit of a start on us. I mean, with no disrespect to Finn Harps, it's disappointing to see them five points ahead of us when we should be a year further down the line in terms of being in the Premier Division and having a full-time squad."

Others seem to agree for there were apparently more than a dozen inquiries from would-be replacements by close of business yesterday.

Fallon denied that Cousins's failure to live in Galway - he commuted to the city from Dublin - was a major factor in the decision but it's clear that others around the club were a little uncomfortable that, while players were expected to relocate, the manager wasn't. Also, there was a sense in some quarters that Cousins was far from well placed to gauge the mood amongst the club's support base when he wasn't living in the community.

Cousins himself said last night he should have been judged on the first series of matches - 11 games - and, given how many times Brian Kerr's observation that you have to wait that long before getting any real sense of how the season in shaping up has been quoted in these pages, he'll get no argument here.

Kerr, though, was speaking in what now look like rather different times. The scale of investment in St Patrick's Athletic last year resulted in a situation whereby a loss of form after an impressive start immediately prompted speculation about John McDonnell's position.

Similarly, Damien Richardson was dispensed with by Cork City during the close season despite the club winning the FAI Cup because the new owners didn't feel he was the man to help them achieve a return on what is shaping up to be a very substantial investment in that club.

For all that, though, only one top-flight manager actually lost his job during the season last year and Pat Fenlon's decision to walk away from Derry City in May was prompted at least as much by personal considerations as it was by the club's poor results.

The likes of Stephen Kenny and Alan Mathews have admitted since that they feel the casualty rate amongst the men in charge of clubs with title ambitions will probably be higher this year and, as Galway's move yesterday has highlighted, the stakes at the other end of the table are just as high with clubs desperate to avoid being relegated to the First Division at what feels like a critical time in the league's development.

Cousins appears to have been well liked at Terryland Park and Fallon expressed sympathy for him last night before admitting: "It's cold and it's cruel, but it's professional sport."

He quickly added that he had told the players to accept their share of the blame for their manager's dismissal because they had failed to perform over the opening weeks of the campaign. He didn't need to add, of course, that they can't simply be changed and those in charge of other sides that have started slowly certainly won't need to be reminded of the fact.