Bohemians hope to have a new manager in place within "the next week to 10 days", club secretary Gerry Cuffe said yesterday in the wake of his announcement that the league and cup winners had dismissed Roddy Collins.

Cuffe said that he and club president Felim O'Reilly intend to sit down with Collins's assistant Pete Mahon at the earliest possible opportunity and added that the long-time St Francis boss "would certainly be one of the people who we will be considering for the position".

The situation is complicated somewhat by the fact that Mahon, who has been strongly linked with the vacant Kilkenny City job in recent weeks, travelled to Italy yesterday with an Irish under-18 amateur squad for an invitation tournament. Depending on results, he will be away for between a week and 10 days.

Before leaving, Mahon said that he was "shocked" by the news of Collins's sacking, which he had received by phone from Collins - who is currently on holiday in America - at 9.15 yesterday morning Irish time.

"It was the last thing I expected to hear," said Mahon, "particularly with him away on holiday, but I said to him that I would talk to him at greater length later on and I wouldn't like to say anything more about it until I have done that."

Apart from Mahon, there has been some speculation that Don O'Riordan, sacked by Galway United last week, might be in the running for the post but there would undoubtedly be widespread interest in taking over at a club which showed last season that it was prepared to pay the price of success.

The fact that Bohemians are due to play their first Champions League game on July 11th makes the question of who takes over, according to Cuffe, "an urgent one which we desperately need to resolve, sooner rather than later".

The need to get the club's preparations for the European games under way was, in fact, given by the club as the primary reason behind the decision to dismiss Collins in the first place.

In a statement issued overnight, the club claimed that Collins had failed to turn up for a meeting with O'Reilly and the club secretary on Saturday, May 19th.

Having made no contact with anybody at Bohemians, it is stated that he then departed for America without informing anybody of his plans for the new campaign.

In his absence, a decision was then taken to sack him in the middle of last week, although the intention was to keep the move under wraps until Collins arrived home at the start of next week.

As it turned out, Collins had his solicitor contact the club and eventually the manager's representative was informed of his client's fate on Thursday morning.

However, the news did not reach Collins for some time, as he spoke to a journalist much later that day about various transfer dealings at other clubs and about a couple of players he was interested in signing.

Meanwhile, Aberdeen officials were last night in Dublin hoping to complete the signing of Shelbourne striker Richie Foran.

Dermot Keely insisted that no offer had been received and that the Scots would have to roughly match the club's valuation of £100,000, but it is believed that the Aberdeen officials were confident that a deal would be concluded.