Dundalk begin their foray into the Europa League group stage on Thursday, so Balls.ie caught up with Eir Sport pundit Damian Lynch. Lynch is a veteran of many of the League of Ireland's greatest European nights: he played under Stephen Kenny's Bohemians in a 3-0 Champions League win against Bate Borisov in 2003, at Pats he played in the side that knocked out Elfsborg of Sweden in 2008. and also played in the Pats team that played Hertha Berlin in Germany's Olympic Stadium in the next round.
He acknowledges that Dundalk's draw (Zenit St. Petersburg, AZ Alkmaar and Maccabi Tel Aviv) is ferociously difficult, but believe they will be competitive, thanks mainly to their manager.
Lynch came through the ranks with Leeds United, and was part of one of the most talented FA Youth Cup winning sides of recent memory. He played at centre-back in a team that featured Paul Robinson, Jonathan Woodgate, Harry Kewell (playing at left-back), Stephen McPhail and Alan Smith. Injuries checked his progress, however, and with his career stalling at Nottingham Forest, Lynch took a call from the then-Bohemians manager Stephen Kenny, who convinced him to come to the League of Ireland.
Lynch's opinion of Kenny remains high:
The draw is very, very tough. I'm worried that people don't realise how good Alkmaar and Zenit are.
Dundalk are a very, very impressive team. As good as they are, I think a lot of it comes down to the manager. Stephen Kenny is, in my eyes, the best manager in the league for many, many years. Purely because, if you see what he has done with the club, he has literally created the club from nothing.
I was working with Setanta back in the day when dundalk were in the relegation play-off against Waterford. If they lost the game, there was talk of them going out of business. But they won that game, Stephen Kenny was appointed as manager two weeks after that.
He has built something from nothing.
Stephen is a big believer in the group ethic. He would sign people for their personality as much as their talent. He manages to galvanise a group together. He then leaves the group to manage themselves as they all have a goal in mind.
The brilliance of Kenny's Dundalk has long since been known to regular fans of the League of Ireland, but their swashbuckling defeat of Bate Borisov, and their subsequent fine performance away to Legia Warsaw, has awoken the wider Irish sporting public to their talent.
The assumption is that the progression of a League of Ireland side into the deeper reaches of European competition is a positive for the League of Ireland. League of Ireland director Fran Gavin echoed these thoughts, telling this website that Dundalk's progress was "fantastic" for the league. But Lynch does not necessarily agree:
I think Dundalk's success is a great thing for Dundalk. What worries me is that people will see the league as a success now. Dundalk have been a success, despite the best efforts of the FAI through not running the league correctly. The FAI have got a lot to answer for, they've been ten years managing the league. I've seen Fran Gavin talking of how Rovers and Dundalk have managed to get to European football, but I think that's in spite of the FAI. The clubs have managed themselves.
I think overall the league is in a mess, and my worry is that this will gloss over it, and paper over the cracks. I genuinely believe that the league needs a drastic, drastic change.
This could have a big knock-on effect on the league:Dundalk have a chance to pull away and make themselves the club of choice across the country. I think Cork City are set up to deliver success, they've had great success at underage in qualifying for th eChampions League and so on, but Dundalk, as a real soccer town, have the opportunity now to pull away from the rest. Other than that, the Dublin clubs are in trouble. There is no support, there is little tie-in with the communities in their area, so it could be a bad thing overall, because I don't see the investment coming or the consumer change in fans going to games.
The need for clubs to associate and tie-in with their local communities is one of the main tenets of the Conroy Report, with subsequent action by the FAI - the granting of each club the sum of €5,000 towards the development of a business plan, for example - all part of achieving that intended purpose.
Lynch, however, believes that there are more drastic changes that need to be made:
I think they need to align [the league] by county. Look at Cork City: great catchment area, there. There are just too many Dublin clubs. They don't associate with a local community...maybe you could say Rovers do with Tallaght. I just don't think see the Dublin club structure as sustainable- you have UCD there too, and Cabinteeley - in my eyes, if I was a schoolboy club, I'd be really frustrated with the way they have changed the League of Ireland to set up the under-19, under-17 and under-15 leagues. You develop these kids to be great players and you pass them on to a football club which have no structure, or haven't gone about building a good structure for that.
I think you need to start again by shutting down the league and starting again, where you would have a North Dublin club and a South Dublin club, and the schoolboy clubs feed into that.
Look at the hurling for example. There's probably eight or nine hurling counties, I think you could definitely pull together 12 soccer counties to deliver a reasonably competititve league overall. That's just an idea I have, it's not perfect, there would be an awful lot of revolution going on, but I just don't see...the likes of Bray, Cabinteeley, UCD, Shelbourne at this stage, they just don't contribute anything to the league, the clubs just aren't run to the level of professionalism that people are aspiring to in the league. But that's the drastic change I'd like to see, and what would then develop is a sense of pride in where you're from, and what club your from.
People keep talking of how it'll change, and it'll improve, but it's not going to improve. The improvement might be if you get a hundred extra people at a game, but that's going to make much of an impact overall.
That FAI grant of €5,000 to each club, announced prior to the FAI AGM in July, soon erupted in controversy. First, Derry City rejected the money, and then Saint Pats' followed suit, releasing a statement on their website claiming that the FAI has "utterly failed in its responsibility to the domestic game". The FAI responded with a statement of their own, expressing their surprise at Pats' rejection of the money, given the fact that Pats' GM Frank Kinsella was present at the meeting during which the €5,000 was agreed upon.
Lynch, as a former Pats' player, finds fault with the €5,000:
I think the FAI get a bad rap at times, and by no means am I their biggest fan [of their running of the league]. It's been ten years of managing the league, and it's been ten years of pretty much non-existent support for the league.
I think the five grand was ridiculous. If they had come with a plan that said 'it's five grand to start a preliminary plan, with a hundred grand in the background to develop that, I think thst's an acceptable proposal. Five grand is shambolic.
If you listen to the Pats' statement, it's very interesting to listen to how the Pats' representative was there listening to the proposal, his job was to go back and share the proposal with the Pats board. He shared it with the borad, and they declined it, and that's how most people would do business. So I think the FAI have a lot to answer for there.
That said, I don't think we should let the clubs off the hook either. The clubs are not set up to be run professionally. Let's be clear: there is no professional league in Ireland, it is semi-professional at best. They're not set up to run themselves correctly, so if I was the FAI I wouldn't be giving them large sums of money to run a business correctly, so you're between a bit of a rock and a hard place.
Dundalk begin their Europa League group phase on Thursday night away to AZ Alkmaar, with kick-off at 6pm.
eir Sport will be broadcasting all six of Dundalk’s Europa League group games on a free-to-view basis. This means that customers on eir Vision, Sky TV & Vodafone TV will have access to the eir Sport 1 channel on their respective platforms and will get to enjoy eir Sport’s exclusively live coverage of Dundalk’s Europa League journey completely free of charge.
The 6 channel eir Sport pack includes ei Sport 1, eir Sport 2, BT Sport 1, BT Sport 2, BT Sport ESPN and the BT Sport Europe channel. The eir Sport Pack is available on eir Vision, on the eir Sport App, on Vodafone TV and on Sky in the Republic of Ireland. eir broadband customers can receive the eir Sport pack for free.
