A few weeks ago the Shamrock Rovers manager Stephen Bradley suggested that the most talked-about League of Ireland season in years hadn’t really been that good.
“I think if we’re being honest, the standard hasn’t been great, has it?” he said.
Bradley was comparing the inconsistency of this season’s top teams to the quality shown by title-winning teams in the recent past who had put together unbeaten runs of 15 or 18 matches. His argument made sense on its own merits.
But the excitement the 2024 league has created proves again that if you were to make a list of all the reasons why people take an interest in football, the technical quality would be down at the very bottom.
Much more important is the sense of some kind of connection with the participants. And that’s why Damien Duff’s presence in the league with Shelbourne has made such a difference.
You can see why long-standing League of Ireland fans would be irritated by people like me talking up Duff’s significance. The barstoolers who have spent years lapping up Murdoch’s swill are jumping on the bandwagon now a celebrity is involved . . .
But social proof is a powerful thing. It underpins the traditional way of developing a connection with football, when you start going to matches as a child with your family and friends. You’re interested because they’re interested.
Attendance records over the years show that most football fans in Ireland didn’t form that early connection with the domestic league. For us, Irish football meant the team that played in green at Lansdowne Road. None of those players played in the League of Ireland. The unfortunate implication was that those who did were second-raters.
Nobody could ever say that about Damien Duff, one of the best players Ireland has ever had. When someone like him is involved and treating it like the most important thing in the world, that’s going to get people interested.
Obviously Duff is not the first Irish football great to try this. John Giles took Eamon Dunphy and Ray Treacy to Shamrock Rovers in the late 1970s, aiming to turn Rovers into an Irish Celtic or Ajax.
It didn’t work out. Dunphy, in his memoir The Rocky Road, says that one of the problems was Giles’ often difficult relations with the media – his refusal to pander or to indulge what he deemed to be stupid questions leading to a fatal case of “this guy thinks he’s better than us . . .”
Duff, by contrast, has connected with his inner madman to become the most quotable figure in Irish sport. Years ago he told me in an interview: “When you’re on the pitch, you’re at your best when you don’t think”.
He seems to have figured out how to manage that way too. He’s not worrying, not second-guessing himself. Sometimes he’s said things he later regrets – like when he apologised the day after saying he would like to “raze Abbottstown to the ground” and “sack 90% of the staff”. But football is the entertainment business and with Duff you have that priceless sense that this guy is saying what he really feels.
Another problem Dunphy identifies with the Giles project at Rovers was that people like Con Houlihan were putting it about that Giles was only in it for the money. His real motive, the critics alleged, was to corner the market in young Irish players for export to England, reaping the profits through an ownership stake in the club.
Dunphy argues that, in reality, Giles had made big financial sacrifices to work in Ireland – but even if the suspicion of his true agenda was ill-founded, such talk created hostility and resentment towards Rovers which held them back.
With Duff there is no such scepticism about his motives. Actually his motives are one of the most compelling things about the story.
A few years ago he did an interview on Richie Sadlier’s Players’ Chair podcast where he admitted that he really didn’t handle free time very well.
“I’m preparing for nothing. I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve driven down the motorway before, down to Dundrum roundabout, and just drive home. I’ve pulled in and gone down roads thinking, ‘Where are you going here?’”
What he was missing about football was not the usual stuff ex-players talk about – the lads, the banter, the buzz. He missed the sense of having something to work towards that gave structure and direction to the days, weeks and months. He has thrown himself into the Shelbourne job because he wanted to commit himself totally to something that felt meaningful.
He has defied the conventional careerist logic that sees world football as a money pyramid with the multibillion Premier League at the top and the broke League of Ireland somewhere near the bottom. In this view everyone in football is ruled by one imperative, which is to scramble up the pyramid as high as they can until they get thrown off.
Duff seems to be taking other things into account: family, place, community, the growth of the game in Ireland, etc. If a Championship club asked him to become their head coach tomorrow, would he take it? Conventional football careerism would dictate that he almost had no choice but to accept. You get the sense, though, that he is chasing something different. There are mountains in Irish football nobody has yet climbed. What would it mean to lead an Irish team to the group stages of the Champions League?
You might argue it’s easier for Duff, after his lucrative playing career, to think about ambition in terms other than money. But he’s not the only person in football who has that option.
Duff’s friend, Robbie Keane, wrote in a recent blog for a bookmaker that while he accepted Thomas Tuchel was a good coach, he worried that “they do all these Pro licenses and courses for English and Irish coaches like myself, and they’re trying to develop and help us, and then they go and get a foreign coach . . .
“We just have to be careful in England and Ireland that we try and promote as much as we can,” he continued. “What’s the point in doing the best you can on these courses if you’re not given an opportunity? It’s about getting the opportunity at clubs first, but unfortunately they seem to be going down the road of hiring a lot of foreign managers.”
Reading this you couldn’t help wondering, has it ever occurred to Keane to try to do what Duff is doing, or does he only consider “opportunities” from higher up the money pyramid?
It might be nice if more clubs believed in Irish coaches, but Duff is showing what’s possible when coaches believe in Irish clubs.