Worried clubs queue up for debt duties

The bad weather may have taken its toll on a few games over the past couple of weeks but it can't be held responsible for the most pressing fixtures clash of the past month or so. Sligo Rovers have been the main victims. Three times they have wanted to get word to the outside world that their financial situation is again in need of urgent attention and three times they've been beaten to the press conference table.

First it was Derry City, then Finn Harps and most recently Waterford United who nipped in ahead of them. Soon they'll be having to set aside free weekends in the league so that football reporters and their papers are free to give adequate coverage to the increasingly regular cries for help from around the country.

All of these announcements have been alarming for the league and its followers but none more so than the one made in Ballybofey a month or so ago by the directors of Harps. For a start the amount of debt involved was, at £356,000, remarkable for a club that had so recently been viewed as a major success story.

Two seasons ago the Donegal side came agonisingly close to winning the FAI Cup. It would have been the club's first major trophy in a quarter of a century and the suspicion persists that had Charlie McGeever's players finished off Bray Wanderers when their supporters had every right to expect that they would then the everything would be different up at Finn Park right now.

Instead, McGeever has gone and his successor, Gavin Dykes, has started to sound a little jumpy each time he answers the phone - in case it's the chairman on to tell him it's time to cut the wage bill again.

It's come down by around a third in stages during the past 18 months and the latest bout of shaving meant that the recently-arrived Kemo Adviu became the even more recently departed Kemo Adviu. The striker, like Declan Boyle before him, was released a couple of weeks ago and the sad fact is that both Dykes and his chairman, Martin Hannigan, say that there may well be more to follow.

Both realise, however, that with the club already trailing Galway United by four points in the National League table the cost-cutting measures already taken have seriously undermined the team's ability to avoid relegation. If Harps were to go down, needless to say, things would get a good deal more grim. Neighbours Derry City were, of course, in a very similar position only a few weeks ago but the special position of Kevin Mahon's club within its community as well as it links to Martin O'Neill helped to bring about a remarkable turnaround.

Taking into account the money from last night's game against Manchester United, City should actually be operating in the black this morning - the challenge for them now is to take full advantage of the unexpectedly clean slate.

How Hannigan and the other directors at Harps would love a challenge like that. Instead, with a debt around twice as big as City's, no high-profile knights in shining armour on the horizon and with everybody feeling that they are suffering on account of coming clean about their problems so soon after Derry had done so, they were at a meeting last night to hear the latest progress on an initiative aimed at raising £100,000 from supporters and well-wishers.

The difficulty is that a variety of other schemes are already being run by the club, so many of the same people end up being asked to dig more deeply into their pockets.

At present the most urgent target is the £30,000 needed to pay an outstanding tax bill. If Harps manage that they will be able to gain a tax clearance certificate which would give them access to a £150,000 grant already awarded for ground improvements.

A game against Derry, for which it is hoped to attract a number of high-profile guest players from England and Scotland, might go a good way towards solving that problem but here Harps have run into a scheduling problem. Harps' league game against Longford, called off recently because of the weather, has been refixed for the 22nd of this month - the night after the Derry fundraiser - and the club, while keen to get the game played as soon as possible so that they can get their hands of the gate receipts - need to have it switched again.

In the meantime, Hannigan admits that the club is "about one week behind" with the wages. Dykes insists that he and his players are more concerned with having been "robbed" by a poor refereeing decision in Cork on Sunday but his chairman probably just wished the club still had something - anything - worth stealing.