Brian Quigley
They say a week is a long time in politics. It also holds true in sport. A week ago a League of Ireland team had still never won in the group stages of European club competition; Sam Allardyce was still the England manager and both Bray Wanderers and in-form forward Ger Pender had records to break in their sights. How would things look by the end of the week?
Well, if a week is a long time in sport a single day can be quite momentus too. Tuesday last 27 September was a day when there was a lot happening in the football world. For starters, there were three SSE Airtricity League Premier Division games that evening, which saw Derry City draw 2-2 with Shamrock Rovers, St Patrick’s Athletic draw 0-0 with Sligo Rovers and Cork City beat Galway United 5-3. The most important thing about these results, taken in combination, was that they conspired to keep Bray Wanderers in 7th place in the league table!
Somehow it felt important that Bray, who weren’t playing that evening, didn’t move down the table as a result of the efforts of the other teams. We are a club that is only looking up at the moment. Friday was on the way, and with it the chance to leap-frog Bohemians into 6th place and the dizzy heights of the top half of the table.
My Tuesday night was made all the more sweet when I checked the cross-channel results and saw that Rochdale had beaten Bolton Wanderers in League One to move up to 15th in the table. We were bottom only a couple of weeks ago. Wins over Millwall and Bolton, 2 clubs with Premier League pedigree, had kick-started our season. Roll on the weekend, away to another team with Premier League pedigree, Charlton Athletic.
Bray and Rochdale aside, it would be remiss not to mention Tuesday night’s other football news – the England manager Sam Allardyce had been sacked. Or resigned, or left by mutual consent, whatever spin you’re having. Maybe the Bolton job would become vacant after their humiliation at Rochdale. Big Sam could go back to where he made it big; they’ve even kept his favourite chewing gum and his bluetooth device in cold storage at the Reebok a decade on, I hear.
Allardyce’s demise came as no surprise to me. Big Sam, like Big Ron [Atkinson] or Big Mal [Malcolm Allison] or Old Big Head [Clough] before him had too much of the wide-boy about him to be a suitable match for the FA in their flagship post. ‘Arry would fall into the same bracket. The quote about flawed pedigree that Garret Fitzgerald made on Charles Haughey’s elevation to Taoiseach comes to mind.
I found the naked greed of a guy on £3m sterling a year abhorrent, and that’s before you mention the pint of wine he was consuming while negotiating his extra-curricular activities. Many column inches have been written about the whole affair since Tuesday, so I won’t add any more on the matter except to mention my favourite quote from all the coverage, which came from the Guardian and described the world Allardyce operated in as a ‘barfing geyser of greed’. I would love to have come up with that myself!
By the time Bray took to the field on Friday night Dundalk had recorded that amazing win in the Europa League on Thursday in Tallaght Stadium, giving themselves every chance of qualifying from their group and giving everyone involved in League of Ireland a boost. Bray Wanderers certainly looked full of power and pace, and when Ger Pender netted against Bohemians after just 4 minutes he wrote himself into Wanderers history by scoring for the fifth league fixture in a row.
John Sullivan added a second before half-time and Wanderers safely negotiated the second half to record a 2-1 win. Sixth place was theirs, for the moment. It certainly has been a while since we were this high up the table this late in a campaign. A club record of five consecutive Premier Division wins added to Ger Pender’s individual history-making. Happy days indeed. One defeat in fifteen games. Roll on the trip to Finn Harps next weekend.
When Rochdale beat Charlton Athletic away on Saturday thanks to a Calvin Andrew strike it put the icing on the cake for me. Three wins in a row against ex-Premier League teams, and four wins in a row in League One. For the third weekend in a row I’d got the double, Bray and Rochdale both winning. Maybe the current good form of both clubs is intertwined in some way – Dale even mirrored Bray by making the top half of the table after the Charlton result. I’m certainly not going to tempt fate by writing about one without mentioning the other. This is the stuff dreams are made of. I don’t want to wake up.