Emmet Malone/National League: come as a surprise, but even more bemusing was the talk from Waterford a day later that there were doubts hanging over Jimmy McGeough's continued tenure at the RSC.

Dermot Keely's decision to walk away from Derry City last week may have

The trouble at United has since been played down, and yet Bohemians manager Stephen Kenny admitted after Friday night's game at the RSC to having been struck by the embattled demeanour of McGeough at the start of the game as the pair shook hands, and by the behaviour of the supporters, who made plain throughout their support for the manager and their less favourable attitude towards the club's owner, Gerry O'Brien.

Before Gavin Dykes was given the job yesterday, McGeough was being linked with a return to his former club, Derry City, as Keely's replacement, which suggests that in the league generally the veteran coach is highly respected for what he has achieved in a couple of seasons in the south east.

What last week's tensions within the club underline, however, is how the job of people like McGeough, managers at middle-ranking but ambitious eircom League clubs, has become almost impossible, in part because of a league structure specifically designed to widen the gap between the game's rich and poor.

The same sort of problems had been highlighted back in July when Kevin Mahon had been dismissed by Derry City, and then again a few weeks back when Drogheda's directors felt the need to replace Harry McCue.

Drogheda have devoted considerable resources to establishing themselves in the Premier Division, and when stories of the club's spending were traded, as they regularly have been, the question of how such things could be sustainable always loomed large.

Still, it is pointed out by his supporters that McCue could only spend what he was given, and that, even with a budget for wages reckoned to be in excess of €8,000 a week, he could scarcely hope to challenge for a place in the top layer of the league's clubs. After that, there isn't a lot of margin for error between survival and relegation in a rather even-looking 10-team division.

He and Mahon had seemed to do well just to keep their respective shows on the road when the clubs went through periods of financial turmoil. The northerner even managed to win the cup last season, but it seems to have counted for little when his team failed to steer clear of the relegation zone in this campaign.

Perhaps the most questionable aspect of the situation at United Park was that the club possessed an increasingly full-time squad that was overseen by a part-time manager, something City had rectified last year when Mahon gave up his regular job in order to concentrate on his work at the Brandywell.

The early part of Mahon's time in charge of Derry had involved cutting wages and other costs in an attempt to rein in spending at a club that was, for a while, on the verge of complete collapse. City never threatened to re-establish themselves as title challengers under him, and his attempts to address shortcomings in his side by buying in from outside met with mixed results. But there was still a feeling he wasn't getting a bad return from the generally local group of players he had at his disposal.

On the whole, he made them hard to beat while attempting to get them to play some decent football, and, in the circumstances, last year's cup win seemed a fine achievement. When his team again found it hard to win this season, however, he was shown the door, although Keely's subsequent attempt to go in and shake an improvement out of a squad he added to actually resulted in a decline in their form.

Dykes and Paul Doolin now face the challenge of succeeding where the men they replace have failed. But they are unlikely to be given any more room for manoeuvre against the background of a league in which three or four clubs are increasingly dominant and the rest find themselves occupied primarily with avoiding relegation.

Those bigger outfits will presumably defend the status quo when the present system comes up for review, but it is hard to see how even Shelbourne believe there is a long-term appeal in a structure that hands them, starting with last Friday night's defeat of St Patrick's, a run of six consecutive Dublin derbies.

Whether they can again persuade enough clubs to side with them when the situation is reviewed must surely be questionable, for, despite all their aspirations, the likes of Derry City and Drogheda United may yet see the need to map out a future based on something more visionary than simply changing the manager the next time catastrophe looms.

emalone@irish-times.ie