Visionary with a salesman's pitch

WHEN Damien Richardson insists that Shelbourne FC is "the entertainment capital of the National League" it is hard not to picture him as the club's MC.

A born talker with an infectious enthusiasm for his club, the National League and, of course, the game, the fact that Richardson has, on his brief spells away from the game, generally earned his money as a salesman couldn't come as less of a surprise.

When he talks about his vision of how the game should be played, it's not hard to imagine the league being transformed into one endless display of neat passes to feet. As he mentions the ground improvements he foresees at clubs around the country gleaming new stands quickly spring to mind. And when he talks about holding barbecues in a corner of Tolka Park in the future as part of an effort to draw whole families back to the club you simply can't help but smell a faint whiff of burgers.

The progress on the last two are the responsibility of others, but Richardson is certainly doing his best to move forward in terms of his team's approach to the game. Widely acclaimed as one of the most entertaining sides in the league when at their best, Shelbourne have attracted the admiration of neutrals but while tomorrow's game will he their third successive FAI Cup final, success in the championship has continued to elude them.

"I think it's clear that we don't have what it takes to win the league and that's something that I have to change for next year," says Richardson. "Winning the cup takes slightly different qualities, though, and we seem to have those, we always seem to lift ourselves for the competition.

"It's like Rovers when I joined them in the late 1960s. Everybody still talks about what a great team they were and they won six cups in a row. I was there for the last two, but it was Waterford who proved they were better by winning the league titles.

"That still annoys me now, that we couldn't pull ourselves together?, and win a league title. Cup success is wonderful and I'll be delighted if we can beat Derry in this match, but I wouldn't like Shelbourne to just go down as the cup team of the 1990s. You'd like to think that there were a couple of league titles in there as well."

While Richardson admits that his side have displayed a repeated tendency to run out of steam at the end of the championship race, he rejects the suggestion that his emphasis on style has hindered the club's chances of winning the title.

Shelbourne have at times lacked the physical strength displayed by Dundalk and Derry over the past couple of seasons. But they will not need to become more robust to wrestle the title back to Tolka Park because the other clubs, Richardson believes, are beginning to see the light and play the game in a more stylish way.

"There has been a constant move towards improving the game as a spectacle. There has to be because unless we provide better entertainment for people there can be no future for the league here.

"There were a lot of signs of it with Derry this year. When they were 1-0 down against us a few weeks ago they completely took control of the match for 20 minutes or so by playing wonderful football, playing right through us, and got themselves hack into it. That was a side I hadn't seen to Derry before and I was really impressed with them, I think we'll be seeing a lot more of it from them next season because they have such good players.

In his own playing days, with Home Farm, Shamrock Rovers and finally Gillingham, Richardson always had very set ideas about how the game should be played. He won three caps, the first of them shortly before he left Milltown, but he feels the move away came too late for him to make a serious impact on the game as a player.

"When I went to Gillingham, people asked me why I would go there and I told them that it was because it was opportune the offer came at a time when I wanted to get away. I saw the crowds were dying away at Rovers and reckoned it was time to move on. By then I was almost 24, though, and it was too late for me, whereas a couple of years previously, when 1 was )0 Preston made an offer for me.

"They were playing in the First Division at the time and it would? have been the perfect time for me to move. Everything was agreed but for some reason - I've never found out what - at the very last minute the deal fell through and I ended up staying here a few years too long."

Later, having retired from playing and then given up a lucrative job selling double glazing to take over as youth team manager at Gillingham, he remained determined to help. "players develop their potential as a away of building a long-term future for the club.

That move to management came at some cost. "It meant a huge cut in pay and, to make matters worse, I had this beautiful BMW 728i which ended up selling to a fellow who lived just around the corner from the ground. So every morning when I was driving in my little Vauxhall Cavalier club car I'd see my BMW with its leather seats and all that sitting outside his house. I could never figure out why I'd done it.

"I still think being a youth team manager is the best job in football because it's all about improving players and it allows you to do that without the pressure of having to worry about results, whereas when I took over the first team there they had just been relegated from the third division to the fourth and the first thing I had to do was sell four or five of the club's best players."

The result, rather inevitably, was a succession of disputes with the chairman followed by a further spell in sales. This time it was financial services. "That was actually going very well, I'd developed a little niche, selling insurance to footballers but it's like they say about the game being a drug, when I got the offer of coming back here to Cork City couldn't turn it down.

"That was only four years ago but even in that time I've seen tremendous progress within the game here. Now we have to take it on to the next step. Off the pitch we have to improve the facilities and bring people back to games, but on it we have to look to Europe. That has to be the be-all and end-all of our priorities.

"We've already come a long way. The last couple of European matches that Shelbourne have lost, against Akranes and Brann, we have actually been the technically better team. But we have to progress to the stage where we can beat these teams and start showing people what our players players can do against top-level.

Before that, however, Richardson, who has long been outspoken in his criticism of those running the game, feels that there has to be a dramatic improvement of the game's administration here.

Another frustration has been the resistance here to the idea of switching the season to the summer months which, he is convinced, would make the game far more attractive to potential spectators and which, he feels, will win the support of a majority of clubs eventually.

For the moment, though, he must content himself with the fact that changes in the way the game is played here have allowed younger players to establish themselves in the first teams of the National League. This has also meant that clubs here have provided an attractive alternative for Irish youngsters in Britain who have failed to get professional contracts at the clubs that signed them as schoolboys and face the prospect of dropping into the lower divisions.

The Shelbourne manager's contribution to that injection of new blood has cent red on the return of Tony Sheridan, Dessie Baker and the somewhat more experienced Pat Scully from England. However, he concedes that, even if his side win at Dalymount Park tomorrow, more new faces will be necessary in Drumcondra.

And who better to persuade them that their future lies at Tolka Park than Richardson, the domestic game's great salesman.