League of weak nations threaten to pass us by

Last Thursday brought another year of European adventure for the representatives of the National League to a premature end. At least there was the small consolation of a win for Cork in their UEFA Cup match against Gothenburg which went some way towards halting our slide on the European rankings table and a long way towards restoring some morale after some terribly disappointing results.

Most disappointing of all, it rather goes without saying, was St Patrick's Athletic's defeat by Zimbru, for when the various draws were made the pairing of our own champions with the best team in Moldova looked, on the face of it, like a pretty good opportunity for at least one of our four teams to progress.

As it turned out, the scale of the defeat was a public relations disaster for the league and if any good is to come of it then it must be the greater realisation of the progress being made in some of those nations whose club football has traditionally been viewed as weak.

The resources that even a side of Zimbru's stature appeared to have at their disposal in the build-up to the games against St Patrick's were a little frightening. It's unthinkable that any Irish club could manage to bring their entire squad to another European capital for two weeks in order to prepare as the Moldovans did. When they got here they showed themselves to be a fairly handy side, but 10-0 on aggregate was still a nightmarish outcome for St Patrick's and the league.

This was only the worst of several of several poor results, though. Although Shelbourne reportedly gave a decent enough account of themselves in the away leg of their InterToto Cup tie against Neuchatel Xamax, the ease with which the Swiss side came here and got the draw they were looking for was disappointing.

The InterToto is understandably seen as the least important of the various club competitions and there is little incentive for Irish clubs to endanger their domestic season for the sake of progressing in this competition. Still Neuchatel were, as Grasshoppers showed against Bray last week, a fairly run-of-the-mill side and the combination of defeats by stronger sides from weaker nations and weaker ones from somewhat more established ones is not encouraging.

The fact remains that whenever there has been a genuine sense of confidence about our clubs' chances in UEFA competitions, it has proven to be misplaced.

This summer has shown that there is still an enormous amount of ground to be made up and that while we are making some progress, many of the countries that we need to overhaul before even setting our sights on the really big footballing powers appear to be moving forward faster than us.

So far there has been a considerable improvement in the attitude towards the European games and, given the enormity of the potential rewards, that is welcome. But events have, for one thing, passed a worthy gesture like the FAI Super Cup entirely by. This year Shelbourne were out of Europe before the games were played and Cork City's players had done one night of running before the competition kicked off.

The varied timing of the different competitions makes the Super Cup an irrelevance for more than one or two of the four teams and instead the FAI needs to look at new ways of helping our teams to prepare, with one possibility being the running of tournaments involving teams from other countries in similar positions to our own. Three competitions, three tournaments a week each involving entrants in the same competition from, say, Northern Ireland, Iceland and Wales, with the countries revolving hosting duties.

A summer league would, of course, be the most immediate leap forward, one which I would like to see tried although I concede there are several good arguments against it. One not so good one put forward by a prominent club official a couple of seasons ago was that as soon as our clubs started qualifying for the latter stages of the competitions the change would be a hindrance rather than a help. It seems safe to assume that if a decent debate on the subject does get going this season we won't be hearing too much of that particular line.