There’s only three teams in Galway

November 9, 2009 in General
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Say goodbye to Kildare County, who just about succeeded in fulfilling their last fixture on Saturday. And say hello to more trouble in store down the line, as, insanely, Galway gets a third team in the league.

The end of the Thoroughbreds experiment, coming after the shock of Derry’s expulsion,  prompts Dermot Keely to call for a radical rethink of the domestic game, though a close read of his comments reveals little by way of a practical way forward.

Keely seems to want clubs to pare back after years of excess that have brought them to the brink. That’s ok as a survival measure but isn’t much of a strategic plan.

Seán Ryan in the Sunday  Independent accuses clubs of lacking ambition in Europe, which would seem to point to a need to invest more in squads, surely something for which there is little stomach just now.

Ryan holds that it is an ‘insular attitude’ that is holding  back the game, which, of course, chimes with the policy of most of his colleagues, in his own newspaper and in sports media generally, of covering British football instead.

Irish clubs have faced this accusation before, and there’s no magic wand that will give them the resources to compete against the likes of  ‘Red Bull’ Salzburg.

Certainly, the entry of  Mervue and Salthill to the league when it is clear that Galway can barely support one team smacks of parochialism, as does the artificial creation of  Sporting ‘Fingal’, the vanity project of a suburban local authority in search of a sense of place.

But another way of looking at insularity is through the lens of local loyalty, something which the GAA and even the Irish media’s beloved British football successfully trade on.

Millwall man Rod Liddle nails that one nicely this week in the Sunday Times, in the context of the stadium naming rights plan being floated at Chelsea:

Chelsea have not been a community club for a very long time. They play in an ephemeral and transitory area of London and their support has come from beyond the perimeters of the city, particularly southwest and west, along the Thames and its tributaries.

The irony is that when Chelsea taunt Fulham fans by singing “There’s only one team in Fulham”, they are right — it’s Fulham. And there aren’t very many Fulham fans, either. The dispersal of the fan base of London’s teams has been most marked in the west of the capital (although it has also happened with my club, Millwall, who tend to draw their supporters from north Kent and Bromley). The changing demographics of the capital and, more importantly, the enormous change wreaked upon the game’s finances by the power of television and the egotism or generosity of owners has been more easily welcomed at Chelsea than at any of the northern clubs (with the possible exception, lately, of Manchester City).

Riddle, of course, is a token yokel writing against the grain of most sports journalism in these islands, which is content to lead the deafening fanfare for the ever-onward-and-upward brigade.

His wisdom comes in a newspaper the Irish edition of which routinely publishes precisely nothing on the League of Ireland in its ample sports section.

But, no doubt, we can look forward to their prescription for the game any time soon. Maybe it’ll be another of those half-baked schemes for a Dublin United, or some such wheeze that really will kill off the league.

What most definitely is needed at FAI level is for a rational attempt to construct a geographically more balanced competition, and not one with six (or whatever it is this week)  LoI clubs in Dublin and three in Galway.

If the people of Kildare had been a little more ‘insular’, they might have a football club bearing their county’s name. Now all they have is what Sky Sports gives them.  Not that they’ll notice.