Dolan's attack on the media unjustified

They may have proven themselves to be the best team in the league for two successive seasons, but it was always going to be difficult for St Patrick's to put what was a fairly nightmarish Champions League outing completely behind them ahead of last Friday night's opening eircom National League match against Derry City.

As it happened, they could have won the game but lost their way in the second period during which time the visitors only took a couple of the four or five very good chances that came their way.

City deserved their three points, but whether they can produce the sort of spirit they displayed to win this match on a weekly basis will be interesting to see. The defending champions weren't helped either by the fact that they were missing four of last season's regulars and while there is plenty of depth within the squad, they could probably in the circumstances have done with having the likes of Packie Lynch, Paul Osam, Eddie Gormley and Stephen McGuinness out there. In the wake of the European games, the players at the club apparently had a meeting at which they discussed what had happened and decided, amongst other things, that the criticism levelled at them in the media had been generally over the top.

This sounds like a pretty straightforward part of the morale rebuilding process that you would expect after the sort of blow they had collectively received and it would be silly for any journalist to take the implied criticism to heart.

Almost a month later, on the other hand, Pat Dolan's attack on the media in last Friday night's programme for the way the club's Champions League games were covered was nothing short of astonishing.

Dolan has won many admirers over the past few years for his tireless advocacy of the domestic game's cause and many of them, myself included, have been journalists.

Yet, after the briefest reference to "our Moldovan debacle" the club's Chief Executive went on to dismiss, in what was quite a lengthy piece, the bulk of the media covering the game here as having been seduced "by the glitzy allure of English football".

Strong stuff and an opinion to which Dolan is perfectly entitled to possess. It would have been nice, given that he was throwing it out into the public arena, if Dolan's opinion had been backed up by supporting facts but sadly there were none.

Instead, what Dolan wrote was that not only were the journalists who covered the game not as supportive as they should be (Dolan, it seems, is a firm exponent of the fans with typewriters syndrome) but that they were actually pleased to have the opportunity to knock the league in general and St Patrick's in particular.

That any club official would think that the local media hope for National League teams to do poorly in Europe seems incredible (at least it does to me and to the other journalists I have discussed the matter with over recent years) and yet this is not the first time this claim has been made in one way or another.

Typically, Dolan makes the accusation more forcefully than I have ever heard it made before but, sadly, he is somewhat economical with his facts.

For one thing, only one daily newspaper really gave the club what might be described as a "going over" (excuse the technical media talk here folks) during the Zimbru experience and that was the Star.

The coverage in that newspaper during the days after the Richmond Park game was seen as excessive but, as it happens, it was not written by sports journalists.

Elsewhere, the coverage was much what you might expect after a 5-0 defeat by Moldovan opposition. The amount of space it got was scaled back because of the size of the defeat and it wasn't the sort of "plucky but unlucky" stuff that Dolan perhaps feels it should have been.

But, having read all of the reports, I can't recall anything which could remotely be described as savage and I'm not sure that anybody even went as far as Dolan himself when he referred to the episode as a debacle.

The Star's role as the leading critic of the club, and indeed the league as a whole, even if it might be even slightly explained away on the basis that Dolan is a columnist for its bitter rival the Sun, was bizarre for the newspaper has spent a good deal of time and money identifying itself with the game here.

Richmond Park bears a considerable amount of signage advertising the newspaper and they are one of the sponsors of the club's programme and this, one can only presume, is the reason why they do not earn a mention from the St Patrick's Chief Executive.

In his article Dolan writes about the way in which his club last year "humbled" Celtic at Parkhead when in fact the match was a well deserved scoreless draw. This too is waltzing on somewhat thin ice for the only way in which a scoreless draw can be construed as a "humbling" is if the underdogs can safely be considered truly useless. Presumably that is not something that the St Patrick's boss intends to imply about his own players.

And if a scoreless draw between Celtic and St Patrick's is a humiliation for the Scots what, relatively speaking, is 10-0 at the hands of a Moldovan side who had themselves only once made it through a round of European competition?

St Patrick's, of course, will be keen to put last month's results down to being out of the ordinary - as they surely were - but it's difficult to do that without also writing off that great night in Glasgow as a bit of an aberration which we would presumably all like to believe it was not.

Certainly nobody was complaining about the media getting carried away in the days after that game.

In any case, things have gone as well as could have been hoped for St Patrick's in the weeks that followed the game, with Zimbru first eliminating Dinamo Tiblisi in the second Champions League qualifying round and then, last week, holding PSV Eindhoven to a goalless draw at home.

Back at the Derry match, meanwhile, we were, perhaps, getting a little taster of how the media might have treated the game had Dolan been getting the sort of fawning treatment he appears to think he is entitled to.

According to the statistics section of the programme, the visit of City was the league champions' first competitive outing of the new season.