BOHEMIANS MANAGER KEITH Long admits that European qualification through league position is becoming a more difficult task, and says his club are undergoing transition having overhauled the playing squad in the last few weeks.
Bohs were beaten 1-0 on Friday night at home to Dundalk, in spite of playing almost all of the second-half with a numerical advantage following Andy Boyle’s red card.
The result leaves Bohs in sixth position with 32 points from 25 games, 13 points from third place and a guarantee of European football. Fourth position – from which they are four points having played a game more – will earn European football provided the FAI Cup is won by a side that finishes in the top three.
“That would have been our objective at the start of the season”, said Long of European football. “It’s still got to be our goal. There are plenty of games left to play but we’ve certainly given ourselves a mountain to climb. On nights like tonight we need to be picking up points and winning games.”
On the game itself, Long said, “We conceded a poor goal right on the stroke of half-time so it changes the dynamic of the game. We were still very much in the game. We started the game excellently well. Ali Coote was excellent down the right-hand side and Ethon Varian was a handful as well. We’d good energy in the team and in the crowd but we lost our way a little bit. We went back to front too quickly for a stretch.
“We go in 1-0 down but we’re still very much in the game and five minutes in the second half Ethon again shows he’s a handful. Andy Boyle gets sent off and rightly so. But we haven’t worked the goalkeeper, we flashed a couple of balls into the box where maybe if Jonathan Afolabi was on the pitch a little bit longer he could have took that home. Liam Burt does something similar but we’d nobody getting on the end of it and I don’t think Nathan Shepperd has had a save to make.
“It’s disappointing because they were down to 10 men for 40 minutes and I suppose we lacked the guile or the killer pass to create openings.”
The Bohs team was almost unrecognisable from the one that started the season. They have completely overhauled the squad in mid-season, with seven of the starting XI – Josh Kerr, Declan McDaid, James Clarke, John O’Sullivan, Ethon Varian, Ryan Burke, and Laurenz Dehl – against Dundalk making their home debuts, while another new signing, Jonathan Afolabi, was a second-half substitute.
The scale of the changes mid-season is big even for the League of Ireland, but Long explains that is a necessary step in transitioning to become a full-time set-up and thus more stable in the future.
“There’s been a lot of changes, 19 or 20 players coming and going”, said Long. “You don’t see that in Premiership, Championship, League One, League Two clubs and very rarely with Irish clubs. We felt this was a window we could attract players with more experience. We’re trying to manage this transition period and I don’t want to use that word but essentially that’s what we’re in. We’ve been a part-time club transitioning into a full-time model.
“I think Ali [Coote] is doing an Open University degree but outside that they’re all full-time. To do that in one or two windows with the players we’ve lost, we’ve had to try and build and plan to give ourselves stability because we don’t want to be losing our best players every season. The best-performing clubs are stable. They don’t have a huge turnover of staff.
“The business that we’ve done should see us on a stronger footing next season. There are players running down their contracts who will have interest from other clubs but it’s important while we’re in the middle of change that the players understand what they’re playing for, the club that they’re at. The Bohs fans expect to see a certain standard from their team. Ultimately at the core of that is honesty of effort, hard work and playing for the jersey.”
