Turns out Damien Duff needs Shelbourne as much as Shelbourne needs Damien Duff.
Last time the Drumcondra club won a League of Ireland title in 2006 the celebrations were cut short by demotion to the First Division due to their precarious financial situation. Duff had just pocketed his second Premier League medal as a Chelsea winger.
“I was a football snob 20 years ago but I’m not now,” said Duff at the beginning of the year, before the start of his third season as Shels manager. “If I don’t have the league right now, I don’t have focus in my life. If you don’t have focus in your life, life ain’t good.”
Since taking over at Shelbourne in November 2021, the 45-year-old has enhanced the global standing of the domestic game in both word and deed. But after 100 caps for the Republic of Ireland and almost 400 Premier League appearances for Blackburn Rovers, Chelsea, Newcastle United and Fulham, Duff was searching for a purpose in life.
Stints coaching Shamrock Rovers under-15s and the Celtic first team eventually brought him back to Kilmacanogue in Co Wicklow where his wife Elaine and children had laid down roots.
In 2020, Duff accepted two jobs, as assistant coach of Stephen Kenny’s Ireland squad and manager of Shelbourne under-17s. Inside 12 months he quit the FAI position following a friendly loss to England, when Kenny’s management was splintered by a controversial video shown to the players before the game. The video was said to be a factor in his resignation, according to reports of the time.
So began a process, led by former Shelbourne chairman Andrew Doyle, to convince him to lay down football roots with the newly-promoted north Dublin club. Crucially Joey O’Brien went from being a veteran defender at Rovers to assistant manager at Tolka Park.
Despite finishing fourth in the Premier Division last season and qualifying for Europe, Duff revealed that the club’s new owners, headed by Turkish media magnate Acun Ilıcalı, had stalled his contract extension talks.
Shelbourne’s Irish investors essentially chose the manager over the promise of sustained investment from the Turkish billionaire, as Mickey O’Rourke, the founder of Premier Sports, brokered a deal to cut ties with Ilıcalı's multi-club ownership that included access to Hull City players.
O’Rourke’s intervention will never be forgotten. Shelbourne started this season like a locomotive train, accumulating 21 points from a possible 27 and avoiding defeat until Bohemians came to Tolka Park on match day 10.
It helped that Shamrock Rovers went winless in their first five games. Turns out Stephen Bradley was fine-tuning his squad for winter football in the Uefa Conference League group stages.
Bradley has questioned the overall standard of football in the 2024 season; Rovers won the last three titles with 72, 79 and 78 points. Shels’ victory last night at the Brandywell means they finished on 63 points in the closest title race since Dundalk edged Cork City by two points in 2014.
Duff and O’Brien spent two years honing a compact, ultra-disciplined style before unleashing a pair of British wingers, Will Jarvis and Liam Burt, to run all comers ragged.
That was the plan anyway.
“Top teams, top players, they are top because they do it as the season wears on and in the business end,” warned Duff in April.
Sean Boyd hit form in May, scoring five goals in six matches, but the mercurial striker only passed Jarvis’s eight-goal haul in the 3-1 defeat of Waterford on October 18th despite Hull recalling Jarvis, the league’s outstanding performer, in August.
As May into June, Shels won six out of seven with a Jarvis-inspired 2-0 defeat of Rovers in Tallaght turning many naysayers into Duff disciples.
Come July, however, the front-runners began to wobble, especially after centre-half Gavin Molloy signed for Aberdeen.
“Agents don’t always have the best interests of the player at heart,” said Duff. “If it was up to me, I’d lock Gav in Tolka Park for the next 10 years. But there’s an out, there’s a clause [in his contract]. He’s going. The club will move on and adapt as we’ve always done.”
But Shelbourne struggled to adapt and move forward, accumulating eight of a possible 30 points from July until Boyd rediscovered his mojo with three goals in vital wins over Waterford and Drogheda United.
“He knows what different individuals need,” said Boyd of Duff. “When we played Waterford, he said to me that Pádraig Amond has the best movement of a striker in the league. ‘You might score goals, but he’s got better movement’. He’d prod you like that.”
As Shels faltered, Derry City were expected to turn three years of squad building by Ruaidhrí Higgins and their chairman Philip O’Doherty into a league-winning campaign following two seasons as runners-up on 66 and 65 points.
Derry’s away form, winning just five from 18 matches, ensured they fell out of contention last week by losing to St Patrick’s Athletic at Richmond Park. The Candystripes can salvage a place in Europe by beating Drogheda United in the FAI Cup final next Sunday.
Unlike 2007, and despite Shelbourne publishing combined losses of €2.3 million in 2022 and 2023, next summer they will compete in the Uefa Champions League qualifiers. As Rovers will attest, this offers a far easier route into the Conference League group stages, and prize money of at least €3 million.
And Duff, who is clearly influenced by his former Chelsea manager José Mourinho, is “not going anywhere anytime soon”.
“I love it here, it’s a special place, it’s my club.”
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