LEAGUE OF IRELAND: THE NEW Cork City "FC" was starting to take real shape last night as Foras appointed former Shelbourne, Derry City and Shamrock Rovers player Tommy Dunne to assemble, then take charge of, its first team. A club administrator and commercial director had also been put in place yesterday.
Dunne, previously the assistant to both Paul Doolin and Roddy Collins at the club, is currently with his family in Finland but the 37-year-old was hoping last night to travel to Cork today but he had, in the meantime, started the work of talking to players by telephone and the squad is expected to start taking shape very quickly.
Eanna Buckley and Kevin Mullen, both of whom previously worked for the old club, have taken on the administrative and commercial roles respectively in the new organisation which is to formally play under the banner “Cork City Foras Co-op”.
Both were hard at work yesterday at the club’s temporary new home, the Turner’s Cross Tavern, where an offer of wireless broadband and coffee on the house proved too good for the new regime to resist.
“Obviously, if somebody out there wants to give us 10 grand we’d be delighted but we’re looking for somewhere to base ourselves at the moment and in the meantime this is the sort of practical support we’re hoping the local business community can provide too,” said Buckley.
Amid rumours Tom Coughlan was still talking about the possibility of an appeal to the Supreme Court and firmer news that the Setanta Cup’s organising committee had handed to 3-0 wins to Sligo Rovers and Cliftonville in respect of their outstanding fixtures against City, representatives of FORAS were preparing last night to travel to Dublin to formally accept an invitation to join the league’s First Division.
Over the course of yesterday they also met the players either contracted to or assembled by the former Premier Division outfit in order to outline their plans and provide a sense of the sort of budget the new club would be operating on. “We made it clear to them, though, if they had other offers they might be better off taking them up and that whoever gets signed by the new club will be entirely a matter for the manager,” said board member Pat Shine.
Meetings have also taken place with members of the consortium that had tried so hard to take over the old “City” from Tom Coughlan but Shine said it would take a little bit longer to establish what, if any, roles Michael O’Connell and Peter Gray might play in the first division outfit.
“We’ve built up a good relationship with them over the last few weeks,” he said, “but we’re flat out on a lot of fronts and it won’t be this week that it all gets sorted, hopefully next week.”
Speaking at Richmond Park, meanwhile, where St Patrick’s Athletic announced a major new sponsorship deal with Nissan, club captain Damien Lynch expressed the hope that the upheaval in Cork might mark a turning point in the fortunes of the league.
“Something has to happen,” he said. “It couldn’t get better until it hit rock bottom and I don’t think that had happened before this.Hopefully, the whole Cork thing will be a catalyst now for the start of a big improvement.”
