THEPLAYERS FOUNDTRAINING TOUGH, BUT TRAINEDWELL ANDENDED UPAVOIDING RELEGATION.

bother with the pitch.’

His first match in charge, though, was an FAI Cup tie against mighty Bohemians, who would go on to win the Premier Division title a few weeks later.

‘We had a lot of decent players,’ Doolin recalled, remembering the build-up to the match.

‘Pat Scully was there, there was a lad called [Lee] Jones from New Zealand, Mark Quinless, Danny O’Connor, Gary Cronin, John Flanagan, Andy Myler, ‘Fabio’ of course, and Shaun Gallagher.

‘We were one minute away from beating Bohs and - this is when you’re talking about coaching - I remember the incident to this day that the equaliser stemmed from.

‘Mark Quinless was playing wide right and Declan O’Brien I think was up front, and Mark played a ball short and Declan went long. Simon Webb or someone picked it up, they broke and they scored and they went on to beat us 3-0 in the replay.

‘Little things like that I changed in United Park with those players.

‘I think we actually beat Bohs [2-0 in the league after that] in United Park, which was really brilliant. I think Fabio and Andy

Myler scored that day.

‘The players found the training tough, to be honest, but they trained well and they ended up avoiding relegation and getting fourth in the league [the next season] which would be good enough now to qualify [for Europe].’

So how did Doolin help transform what was virtually the same squad from relegation contenders to European hopefuls in the space of 12 months?

‘I asked the club what they wanted,’ he recalled.

‘Vincent - the late Vincent Hoey - was there all his life and he was brilliant for Drogheda and an absolutely great man. They said they wanted to be successful, so I had to explain to them what it would take to compete with Shels and Bohs, who were full-time. I said if you want to be up there you’re going to have to do certain things.

‘The second season we had the likes of Barry Molloy, a few fellas there who were semi full-time. It wasn’t easy, but we wanted to not have a season at the bottom of the table and see if we could win the League Cup or FAI Cup.

‘In the end we got to the semi-final of the FAI Cup that year and finished fourth with basically the same group of players.

‘It goes to show you that with the right things done, the right coaching, the right everything, that it could be done.

‘Then the club wanted to push on again, and the club in fairness were absolutely brilliant.

‘The facilities were not great and we needed somewhere to train and Vincent and myself scoured around this area. We went down to Gormanston and spoke to the people there and then tried somewhere near the rugby club in Drogheda if I’m not mistaken, and then Vincent said we’ll go in here [to Mosney] and Phelim McCloskey there was very friendly with Vincent and a really accommodating man for what we were looking for.

‘What we had was basic enough to other full-time clubs outside Ireland, but maybe not inside Ireland. I introduced having lunch - beans, eggs, soups, sandwiches, fruit, jam and Nutella, that kind of thing.

‘We had the two pitches for training and they were brilliant because I could do the training I wanted.

‘I remember signing players who were at full-time clubs and they were asking ‘is training going to be good and is training going to be during the day’, and I said ‘yeh’. They couldn’t believe it at the time because of the history with the club.’

All the while Doolin was putting into practice some of the training drills he’d learned at UCD from a renowned Dutch coach.

‘Foppe de Haan used to come over to UCD and while I was there he asked me, did I want to go over [to the Netherlands].

‘I took him with a pinch of salt at the time, but the following year I decided to go and I went another five times after that and it was a great education to study under a man who had successfully taken a club - maybe not unlike Drogheda, low down, a small club - Heerenveen - and qualified them for the Champions League and further on had taken the Dutch Under-21s to two [European Under-21 Championship] winner’s trophies.

‘He was an absolutely wonderful man. I used to go there every morning and I was like one of the staff there and he taught me about training, and at the time there was really nobody doing the kind of training that he was showing me, how to do it and how to set it up, the times and the rest periods.’

Next week Paul Doolin reflects on Drogheda United’s historic FAI Cup triumph of 2005 and the club’s first victory in Europe.

Doolin’s first game in charge - Andy Myler celebrates with Mark Quinless and Don Tierney after putting Drogheda ahead in the 2003 FAI Carlsberg Cup tie with Bohemians at United Park, but the Gypsies equalised late on and won the replay at Dalymount.

Paul Doolin’s Drogheda United team line up ahead of their 2004 FAI Carlsberg Cup semi-final tie with Longford Town in Flancare Park. Back (l to r) Gary Rogers, Declan O’Brien, Andy Myler, Danny O’Connor, Steven Gray, John Flanagan; Front (l to r) Sean McClare, Barry Molloy, Jermaine Sandvliet, John Lester and Gary Cronin.

Drogheda and Bohs crossed paths again several times in 2004 and trying to stop the advance pictured of Tony Grant who is Danny O’Connor would become a Doolin signing two years later.