Dalymount Park Hosts Pre-Season Q&A

 

Bohemian FC held a successful pre-season Q&A session on Friday night with manager Keith Long and players Lorcan Fitzgerald, Derek Pender, Shane Supple and Dinny Corcoran – and also raised some money to help a fan in trouble.

 

Fans were invited to ask questions to Long and his players about the upcoming season, with club president Matt Devaney also in attendance.

 

Many issues were addressed from the departure of Roberto Lopes to Shamrock Rovers, to the upcoming Dalymount Park refurbishment.

 

After the Q&A finished, a charity auction was hosted by the Liberties’ own world famous Ireland fan Davy Keogh to support Mags Forkan, a Bohs supporter who needs life-saving surgery in America. The auction included match-worn Glen Crowe and Tony O’Connor jerseys as well as the famous Bohs home shirt signed by football legend Pelé.

 

The auction raised an impressive €2,497 for Mags’ cause, part of an ongoing fundraising campaign led by her husband Jimmy Dignam..

 

In the Q&A Bohs gaffer Long was keen to temper expectations for fans who might want a season in the vein of 2015’s fifth place finish. “We want to be successful,” he said. “I said all the clichés, ‘we want to do well in the league and not put emphasis on the cup’s’ before and it came back to bite me last season.”

“Success is relative. There are different levels of it. Success for us next season, in my view, is staying in the division with three teams now going down.”

 

The former Bray Wanderers coach admitted that “the season never really got going” last year, and put his team’s supposed lack of togetherness down to a variety of factors, most notably an inability to find consistency. “We never got a consistent run of games where we found a flow… We never really gave the fans enough to get excited about. When we went out of the cup to Derry I felt our season had gone flat.

 

“Then, just as we started getting a decent run of results going, for example when we beat Pat’s here 5-1, which was probably the highlight of the season, we were interrupted with the mid-season break… I’m not looking for excuses because it just wasn’t us last year. If you compare it to the year before, the identity with the club that the team had just wasn’t there.”

 

Captain Derek Pender admitted to initially going to Shelbourne matches in his youth down the road at Tolka Park, before finding a way to sneak into Dalymount park turned him into a Bohs fan!

 

All-Ireland gaelic football winner Shane Supple, who was understudy to Stephen Cluxton in the 2015 Dublin team said of Dalymount: “For me, it’s a special place. Yeah it’s great that there’s a new ground coming and that, but there’s a certain character to this place.”

 

Club president Matt Devaney gave a rallying call to supporters to get behind the team both on and off the pitch this season, a sentiment that was echoed numerous times throughout the night by manager Keith Long.
Bohemians kick off their season at home to Derry City on February 24th at 7.45 PM.