EMMET MALONEtalks to Shamrock Rovers manager Michael O'Neill as his side prepares to open their new home

THOSE WHO have passed through Shamrock Rovers during what may well come to be known as “the wilderness years” are generally well equipped with stories of just how bad things got for the country’s most successful club at one time or another since leaving Milltown.

During most of the 22 years since Glenmalure Park was sold to the developers, being homeless was only part of the problem. One former player recalls the moment the scale of the difference between myth and reality dawned on him as being the morning a few seasons back when he turned up to training at Marlay Park only to be told if one of the park keepers arrived everyone had to grab their gear and scarper.

As he sits in the foyer of the hotel adjoining the club’s new home in the heart of Tallaght, alternating between laptop, mobile and personal callers, Rovers manager Michael O’Neill doesn’t seem like the sort that would have hung about in anything like those circumstances. However, you get the sense from him he probably had a fair idea about what the club’s recent past had involved before he took on the job during the close season of helping to shape its future.

A thoughtful, quietly-spoken northerner who played 33 international games and had stints with more than a dozen clubs, O’Neill gives the impression of being someone who has never made a move he hadn’t weighed up very carefully. During his playing days he acquired an impressive list of academic and professional qualifications but, what with the financial services business not being quite what it was, the 39-year-old reckoned if he was ever going to give full-time football management a crack then this was the time to do it.

Having established a good reputation with Brechin City in Scotland he could have made the step up there. Dundee came knocking and there was said to be interest from Inverness, but, he insists, the whole Rovers “project” had a particular attraction. So now, while his wife and two young daughters wait to follow on from Edinburgh, O’Neill has been working flat out to prepare the squad for the biggest night of the club’s recent history from his godmother’s house in Dún Laoghaire.

“I could have stayed in Scotland all right,” he says, “but once I met Jonathan Roche and the other directors, once they told me about what was happening with Rovers, the way it is run, the stadium and all of that, once they explained the whole project to me, I saw it as having a unique appeal.

“I don’t think I’ll be damaged by anything that might happen here. I’d very much like to be successful here but the first aim is to put the very best team on the pitch we can with the money available to us – I don’t want to be telling anybody in nine months they have to take a pay cut.

“And if we’re not as successful as everyone would like I still think I’ll have a good reputation in Scotland. What I’m thinking about now, though, is the fact I have a three-year contract and I can happily envisage myself being here a good deal longer if that’s what it takes to get this club back to where it should be.”

Things are, he believes, moving nicely in the right direction with the board having done a great deal of groundwork on establishing Rovers in their new locality, the squad having been significantly improved since last season and feverish building work continuing cross the road as we speak on readying the club’s new home for tonight’s game.

“I do feel like I’m gate-crashing the party a little,” he says. “It’s a night for the people who have spent 20 years on the road with the club, the ones who have dragged it back from the brink of extinction. Friday is their reward.

“I’ve been massively impressed with what they have managed to put in place with the local community already,” he continues in reference to the 10 per cent of club revenue put into a wide variety of scholarship, sponsorship and coaching initiatives in Tallaght and other areas of the city during the past few years. “To invest in the way they have when there are day-to-day bills to be paid as well is a bold step but you can see the benefits of it everywhere around here already. The intention now is to show the fans things are moving in the right direction on the pitch too.”

There will be a full house of 3,500 (the capacity should more or less double during the summer when a second stand is completed) on hand this evening to gauge the progress. Sadly, Pat Flynn and Seán O’Connor are suspended, while Sligo will be without Alan Keane, Chris Butler and Mauro Almeida but somehow the line-ups are of slightly secondary importance as Rovers prepare to light up their new home.

The club’s previous levels of success may be difficult to restore but for the moment that hardly matters either. What’s important this evening is that the wilderness years are officially at an end.

ROVERS VOICES

ALAN O’NEILL

(former player and manager).

“It’s major, huge . . . one of the biggest developments in the league since they left Milltown. It’s a great credit to the fans who have pulled it off because they’ve shown what a love for a club can do. They’ve achieved this with their hearts and pockets although I know quite a few of them and there’s some decent brains up there too.”

DEREK TRACEY

(played for 17 years with the club while it was “on the road“)

“I never thought I wouldn’t see it as a player, to be honest, but then when I was retiring it was in the back of my mind that maybe it wouldn’t happen at all. It’s a tribute to the lads running the club that they kept at it, though. You have to hand it to them, other guys would have become disillusioned but they stuck at it and this is their night.”

MARIE CORR

(Mayor of SDC and mother of Rovers Cubs Academy players Daisy and Dara)

“We’ve the fourth biggest urban population in the country and the only thing we’ve never been short of in the area is footballers. It’s terrific the council had the foresight to invest in this when the times were good because now, when the news all seems to be bad, this has provided a real lift to everyone out in Tallaght.”