Shels shock worth a fortune
Club secretary Ollie Byrne who, having seen many bad times as well as the current glory days, is very conscious of moving the club forward. A win for Shels would guarantee six Champions’ League ties and untold riches beyond the expectations of any previous Irish club.
“We dreamed all along about something like this and now some part of the dream has become a reality. There is no shadow of doubt we are talking of millions. There is a track record there that what Rosenborg and what Malmo and various teams around Europe have accumulated by qualifying for the group stage and it is phenomenal what can be achieved if we got a result in the 90 minutes,” Byrne says.
“But that’s when the most difficult stage of all will come for Shelbourne football club because while there has been a plan that helped us achieve what we have so far, there would have to be real serious planning put in place for the future.
“We’ve always had the anxiety of living beyond your means and making sure you got the wages for everybody on a Friday. At the moment we’re keeping our feet solidly on the ground because we have an uphill battle.
“You cannot end up spending any money you might earn in such a way, that a few years down the road - you would have what has happened to Hajduk Split, who find themselves in serious financial difficulties.
“When you come and play in these European competitions and you notice the facilities and the infrastructure the clubs have, like the training facility here at Deportivo that has been put at our disposal, it is obvious the first thing Shelbourne have to do is - something which we are presently trying to do in conjunction with the city councils of Dublin - that is to move to a new area where we could have the whole club based with training facilities for the first team, with all-weather pitches, small sized pitches for underage players in our schoolboy section, which is possibly the strongest in the country.”
For manager Pat Fenlon, however, the challenges are more immediate and on the playing field rather than in planning for the future.
Fenlon, however, is not concerned about what Deportivo are doing, he is more focused on his own side.
“It doesn’t really matter to me who is playing on their team,” he says. “We’ll set out to play the way we want to play and try to stop them playing. We’ve done well to get where we are but we are not happy enough to settle for where we are, we want to progress and we want to be playing games against the likes of Deportivo.
“I think when you play teams like this, you cannot help but notice the technical ability of the players and the movement of the players which is at a much higher level than we are used to. That’s obviously something the players have learned over the couple of rounds we’ve come through and in every round it’s got higher and higher.
“We have a belief in our own camp and amongst our own players that we have probably got them at a better time than if you were playing them after they had played 20 odd competitive games. They would not be completely different opposition but they would be further along. There’s nothing substitutes for competitive matches.”
For club captain Owen Heary, the whole Champions’ League experience has been one to savour and has left him hungry for more.
“There’s extra pressure, yes, but these are the games you want to be playing in. We’ve had a heavy run of important matches at home and in Europe recently but it’s much better to be having to deal with the pressure of that, than to be playing in a series of meaningless matches and to be sitting at home twiddling your thumbs while matches like this are going on.
“It’s hard to believe we’ve got this far. No one expected us to get through and now we are in with Deportivo, one of the best club teams in the world who finished higher than Real Madrid last season in the league, which is some achievement. But we are here now and we’ll deal with this match tomorrow.”
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