A year after he departed from Shelbourne Damien Richardson's widely expected return to National League football was confirmed in Tallaght yesterday when Shamrock Rovers named him as Mick Byrne's successor.
The task for Richardson, who left Tolka Park after failing to secure a league title for Shelbourne, will be to dramatically improve on Rovers's performance over the past couple of seasons, during which large amounts of money have been spent on players without any significant progress being made.
Club chairman Joe Colwell confirmed yesterday that further funds would be available to the new man but Richardson maintained that the immediate task would be to meet with the players, 10 of whom are out of contract at the moment, "to see who wants to stay and who I want to keep, then we'll decide what we need to do in terms of bringing other players in."
Richardson has been given a three-year contract and although neither he nor Colwell would be specific about targets, it would seem reasonable to assume that the former Rovers player will be expected to have the side challenging for the league title again in the not too distant future.
With Colwell expressing confidence that the delayed move to Tallaght is now no more than a year away (the club will almost certainly play at Santry stadium next season), there will be a determination to make the move while the team is on a high and that will require a dramatic improvement on this season's first round exit from the cup and eighth place finish in the premier division.
"There are a lot of positive things going for the club, though," said Richardson yesterday. "Mick assembled some very good players but was perhaps a little unlucky in the end that things didn't quite work out. But I think this is the most exciting period for the club in the last 25 or 30 years and I'm very proud to be back involved with it."
Later today another chapter in the history of Home Farm will be written in Galway where the National League a.g.m. is expected to approve proposals by the club's chief executive Ronan Seery aimed at distancing the club's league team from the rest of the Whitehall set up.
The club's senior team will for at least the next five years operate as a separate entity and is likely to be re-elected under the title Home Farm Fingal. The changes are the result of Seery looking to build a new identity for the club in what he feels are previously unexploited areas of Dublin's increasingly urbanised northside.
For the moment the club will remain at Whitehall but if proposals at today's meeting that first division club's must have 800 seats and premier division clubs 1,500 by the start of next season are approved then it is possible that the they will have to look for a new home after the forthcoming campaign. "It depends what the attitude of the committee at Home Farm is to developing Whitehall," says Seery.
The league season will almost certainly start on August 18th with the League Cup being moved to mid-season and having its format radically altered - the regionalised groups of four will remain but the competition will now be a knockout affair.
