Pile-up a likely fixture for the future

Emmet Malone/On Soccer: With opportunities for players here to earn representative honours so thin on the ground, events like the four-nation inter-league tournament held in Scotland last week should be occasions for some celebration within the Eircom League.

Instead, the involvement of Pat Devlin's side in the competition highlighted the ongoing problem that Irish clubs have with legislating for the absence of their players due to international call-ups and ended up generating as much negative publicity as positive.

Last season a club had to have three players on international duty before it was entitled to call for a match to be postponed, a situation that caused a succession of disputes as managers, some with a long record of complaining about locally based players being overlooked by their international counterparts, complained instead that key members of their sides had earned outside recognition.

The situation was addressed at the league's a.g.m. where, in an unusual (and slightly disturbing) show of unity the clubs decided to lower the required number of affected players to just one, a move that has already started to backfire.

Having decided to press ahead with full programmes of league games through June when they will be going head-to-head with televised games from Euro 2004, on the basis that they did not want a repeat of the disruption caused by last year's break for the Special Olympics, clubs lost half of last week's fixtures because of an infinitely more low-key event.

Worse still, when Brian Kerr named his squad for this week's game against Romania and the three international matches that follow, he explained that his decision to leave players like Jason Byrne and Glen Crowe on the stand-by list was, in part, due to the fact that their clubs' games might be postponed if they were included in the panel.

In relation to the Scottish tournament, the decision by St Patrick's Athletic to seek the postponement of their game against Bohemians on the basis of Keith Fahey's inclusion in the travelling party highlighted how slight the impact has to be under the new regulations before it beats a path to the league's offices.

At least, however, Fahey (who subsequently withdrew from the trip through injury) has started every league game for the Inchicore club this season. Shelbourne's match at Drogheda ended up being postponed on the basis of Ger Rowe's and Alan McDermott's unavailability.

Rowe hadn't featured in Shelbourne's previous three league games and hadn't started one since the defeat of Dublin City in early April while McDermott's one appearance of the campaign to date was as a first-half substitute for Glen Harris.

Next season the inter-league tournament is to be staged here and it is intended that the league's clubs will be asked to break for a week in order to allow a full-strength squad to be selected. The idea of playing representative games against other leagues is also being explored but clubs will have to decide before next year's a.g.m. whether they are serious about making the commitment required to prevent such events being counterproductive.

If so then the league's fixture list needs to be adapted to allow for their incorporation without serious disruption. Similarly, the wisdom of playing games on weekends when the Irish senior and under-21 teams are in action needs to be looked at. Don Givens, after all, looks likely to continue including home-based players in his squads while the likes of Crowe and Byrne will be in contention for places in the senior panel.

Even if this wasn't the case, though, it's hard to see how clubs can hope to raise the profile of their games when they are taking on not only English, major Scottish and highly attractive Champions League games, as they have done in recent months, but also their own national teams.

In reality a wider-ranging review of how the league season is structured needs to be undertaken with the scheduling of the campaign, as well as a more effective use of bank holiday weekends and midweek dates.

Getting to the stage, however, where news of a player's international call up isn't treated like something akin to a death in the family would, for the moment at least, mark a step in the right direction.