Rovers' return has not repaid investment

The news that Joe Colwell has been persuaded by those around him at Shamrock Rovers to stay on as chairman until at least the end of the season somehow seems less surprising than his original decision to quit the position.

Colwell looked shattered as he sat alone in the stand at Oriel Park in the aftermath of Rovers's spectacular exit from the Carlsberg FAI Cup on Friday night. And though those he told of his decision to resign were shocked, the decision was entirely understandable. His frustration got the better of him after seeing the club he has put so much time, money and effort into in recent years fail again.

A few weeks ago Damien Richardson's side were in contention for all three trophies: the league had looked a long shot for quite a while, but they went into their League Cup semi-final against Limerick and the FAI Cup semi-final against Dundalk as favourites.

The defeat to Limerick at Jackman Park was by far the greater of the upsets, though its implications were not nearly so great.

Club officials at both Rovers and Bohemians had been hoping that they might have ended up facing each other in the League Cup final as it would probably have proven quite profitable for both. However, with no UEFA Cup spot at stake, and with Derry subsequently winning the other semi-final, Rovers's exit can't have ended up being such a huge blow to either the club's team or board.

On Friday, though, they badly needed to halt their recent slide against Dundalk. But the league position of Martin Murray's side has come to look a little misleading of late. Dundalk had amassed a six-match unbeaten run going into the Rovers game, a run that followed defeats by Bray and St Patrick's Athletic prior to which they'd gone another six games without defeat.

Rovers, on the other hand, had lost three in-a-row and everybody at the club knew that another defeat would all but end their season. Now they are faced with having to scrap it out to hold on to the InterToto place, a poor consolation in the circumstances, although not nearly so poor as it used to be now that the competition will fall nicely into the club's pre-season build-up.

Still, given the scale of the defeat and the wider disintegration of the club's ambitions for the season it's not all that hard to see why Colwell, who subsequently told a Sunday newspaper that he has two mortgages on his house as a result of his involvement with Rovers, should have decided that enough was enough.

Both club and league are undoubtedly the richer (in directly inverse proportion to the extent to which he will be the poorer, as it happens) for his change of heart. But the dismay which his original decision caused amongst other senior officials on Friday evening highlights once again how hopelessly dependent some of our biggest clubs are on the willingness of individuals to support them beyond any reasonable expectation.

Sunday's second FAI Cup semi-final between Bohemians and Derry City was interesting, meanwhile, for the way in which it highlighted the impact that television cameras can have on the way we view refereeing decisions.

RTÉ's untypical multi-camera presence at Dalymount meant we were able to watch the late penalty incident from a number of angles - all of which tended to support Hugh Byrne's decision to award the spot kick.

Clubs often come away from a game feeling that they've been robbed by a poor decision. Clearly both City's management and supporters reckoned they'd been hard done by in relation to Eddie McCallion's challenge on Glen Crowe. If there had been only one camera angle involved they might have argued that the evidence was inconclusive, but the footage carried by RTÉ on Sunday evening was pretty conclusive.

On another night, of course, the pictures would be coming back to haunt the match official. But Sunday's case illustrates how much more informed the debate about the quality of the refereeing here could be if the quality of the television coverage regularly provided reliable evidence on which to fall back.

emalone@irish-time.ie