Stephen McPhail eyes boyhood title dream with Shamrock Rovers

He did, he admits, think long and hard about hanging up his boots in the close season but eventually, he says, the lure of playing one more season and perhaps finishing his career on just the sort of high he dreamt of as a boy, proved too much for Stephen McPhail.

Staying fit, he knows, will be a battle; one that Damien Duff ultimately felt he couldn't win.

But despite having turned 36-years-old himself in December, McPhail reckons he still has something to give at Shamrock Rovers.

“Yeah, probably towards the back end of last season we (he and Duff) had loads of conversations about how the bodies were,” he says. “Obviously Damien’s coming back from a massive injury and he’s struggling with it really. He probably didn’t want to say that while he was here but you could see that he was struggling with it.

Hamstring problem

“Mine was a bit different. It was a hamstring problem from last year but I got over that quite quickly and I was able to get back to some sort of form. I was fit then did it again in preseason but I’ll be fine.”

He is out of Friday’s game against Wexford Youths and the trip to Donegal on Monday but hopeful of training next week and coming into the reckoning for the first meeting of the season with St Patrick’s Athletic. By the time that game is out of the way, the midfielder and everyone else at the club will have an early inkling of how the season is shaping up and whether McPhail’s hope of going out on a real high this October might have any real substance to it.

“It would be great,” he says. “When I was travelling around, following Rovers as a young lad it was something that I would have been hoping that I would have the chance to do. Obviously when you’re getting to the end, every year slips by and you’re thinking ‘what next?’ but that would be great, yeah.”

In the meantime, he has already has one eye on the future and a career in coaching.

He works with the Under-17s at Rovers, one of several high profile players, past and present, in a set up that was reported yesterday to be attracting potential partnership interest from West Ham.

He is, he says, taken with the work and impressed by the potential of the young players but, like Graham Barrett, who also helps out with the club's youth teams, he worries about teenagers here being disadvantaged by comparison with their overseas counterparts.

"I had a read of it (Barrett's article for The Irish Times) and he is spot on with what he says. The number of hours our young boys get coached is way down on everywhere. They have the ability; the lads on our under-17's have unbelievable ability. But getting awareness and game understanding, being coached properly and having a professional set up that the kids at clubs in England)have, it's not there.

“But you can’t point fingers at them; we are going to have to look at the whole structure of the clubs.”

Resources are an obvious issue, he acknowledges but then he looks t Leeds, the club where he spent almost a decade of his career and wonders how it could go so terribly wrong somewhere where there should be the will and the wherewithal to do things well.

“It’s gone from bad to worse,” he says. “The turmoil there is there for a club with such a fan base is just heartbreaking – especially for an ex-player who grew up there.

“It was a great place to nurture talent and still is. I watched them last week and three or four of their best players are the youngsters coming out of the youth team. They need to sort it out. I don’t know if the owner is anyway helpful or what is going on but it doesn’t sound too healthy.”