Tommy Martin: How a different approach is benefitting Shamrock Rovers

The plan was to build a club, not just a team. Develop players in a proper academy that looked after education as well. Engage with the local community, develop facilities, full-time football

DIFFERENT APPROACH: Shamrock Rovers manager Stephen Bradley. The plan was to build a club, not just a team. Pic: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile

It’s Tuesday and we’re at the Roadstone Sports and Social Club on the outskirts of Dublin where a bus awaits to take Shamrock Rovers into Europe. Players are picking the remnants of lunch from their teeth, kitmen are hauling skips of gear and the manager, Stephen Bradley, is brushing his hair.

The Roadstone Club was built in 1968 for workers in the nearby quarry, set up in the 1930s by a couple of brothers from Inchicore. That company met Irish Cement in 1970 and begat Cement Roadstone Holdings, now one of the biggest building materials suppliers in the world.

Did Bradley and Shane Robinson have global domination in mind when they sat down nearly a decade ago and hammered out a plan for Shamrock Rovers? Probably not. Two old midfield buddies from league and cup winning days at Drogheda, they were in the baby-steps of their coaching careers. A half-decent football industry would suffice. The world could wait.

The plan was to build a club, not just a team. Develop players in a proper academy that looked after education as well. Stop assembling teams on the fly in the classic League of Ireland style, where players shuffled around on free transfers in the close season or were lost to England for nothing. Engage with the local community, develop facilities, full-time football. That sort of thing.

They took their ideas to the board and the Shamrock Rovers academy was set up. Roadstone’s hub of quarrymen’s leisure became home for the Hoops’ bright young things and the first team base too. Robinson is head of the academy, the one that sold Gavin Bazunu to Manchester City and Kevin Zefi to Inter Milan. Bradley got the first team gig in 2016 and survived some lean years and the never-miss-an-opportunity derision of rival fans.

Now he’s going for three in a row in the league and is pulling a brush through his hair because he is squeezing in a TV interview before heading to Gent for his team’s second Europa Conference League group stage game. He is a quiet, contained presence around the club’s day-to-day base, more like a discreet civil servant than a domineering Big Sam figure. 

He slips into the room and asks us if we would like something to eat in the canteen. Before the cameras roll, he chats thoughtfully about Graham Potter taking over Chelsea and how to get tactical messages across to players when the games are coming thick and fast.

He is knee deep in that right now and what a thrill it must be, plotting it all out, pitting his wits, reacting to tactical gambits from opposing managers, like when Djurgarden’s coach Kim Bergstrand threw on four subs in one go in last week’s Conference League opener.

Bradley left some of Rovers’ best players on the bench for that game, including top scorer Rory Gaffney and star player Jack Byrne. Both kicked their heels for an hour before seeing action in the 0-0 draw. That the pair were being saved for a home league game with Finn Harps three days hence raised eyebrows. 

But three points against Harps might end up being the winning of another league title and, eventually, another group stage run with a €3 million cheque. He says the players get it. There have been “open and honest conversations.” All part of the plan. All eminently sensible.

Bradley’s football life is a sort of allegory for the Irish game and its growing pains. He was your typical teenage superstar, signed to Arsenal at 15, rich enough at 17 to have the flash car, the penthouse apartment, the fuck-you watch. The hunger evaporated and he was overtaken by others in professional football’s unsparing Squid Game, Cesc Fabregas among them.

Aged 18, he was stabbed in the head when his London home was burgled and spent a year and half out of the game in contemplation. He returned home and did the League of Ireland circuit but was already consumed with coaching. He retired in his late twenties, as if impatient to right the wrongs that waylaid his own playing career, to put a bit of decency and cop on into a process run by greed and chaos. 

Even in the background as a young coach at Rovers he was speaking in the media about the need to prepare young Irish footballers for what lay in store, to educate them and mind them, not just to send them over heedless into the maw of the English football beast.

Now Rovers are the envy of their rivals, with their tidy municipal stadium, private investment, growing fanbase and off-field structures. Earlier this year, Bradley turned down an offer to manage Lincoln City thanks to the persuasive powers of shareholder Dermot Desmond and his own commitment to where this Rovers thing might go.

Two of the three men to previously bring an Irish team into group stage European football went on to manage their country. Ask Bradley about ambitions and making a name for himself and he says it’s the last thing he’s thinking about. He sticks to the script: this is about new challenges and improving as a team and building as a club and all that.

But then Bradley probably knows that old line about God laughing when we’re making plans. Earlier this year his 8-year-old son Josh was diagnosed with leukaemia. Bradley’s carefully plotted world was torn apart. He was prepared to quit his job but his wife, Emma, urged him to continue. Josh has been able to go to recent games. The kid is his biggest critic, he laughs.

“I’m doing okay,” Bradley says when I ask how he is. “I’m very lucky to have support structures that I have around me, the wife and family that I have, to allow me to go do my job. It’s helped me in the sense that at the end of the day we’re playing football, family and kids are number one and it’s helped me enjoy these occasions rather than being too worried about the result. It’s nice to go home and be able to give him a hug.” 

That sounds like a plan, alright.