WORKING FOR THE FAI WOULD BE OF INTEREST TO ME. I’D WORK FOR ANYONE, IF I FELT I COULD MAKE A DIFFERENCE...
HALFWAY through the interview in Hollystown Golf Club, Pat Fenlon steals a glance at a nearby TV, which is showing highlights of Hibernians against St Mirren in t he SPL Premiership.
Hibs claw back from 3-0 down to 3-2 only to fall short yet Fenlon derives no satisfaction from the outcome.
‘I hope Terry [Butcher] does well there because I want the club to do well,’ he says quietly. More than two months have elapsed since Fenlon dramatically called time on his two-year reign at Easter Road, insisting he had taken the club as far as he could.
While his departure didn’t lead to an outpouring of unrestrained grief in the Scottish capital — former Hibs striker Garry O’Connor argued Fenlon should never have been appointed — the Dubliner is at ease with himself as he reflects on his body of work.
‘Everyone has an opinion on it, I have my opinion too,’ he says.
‘When we went in, we were struggling against relegation but we stayed up. We got to two [Scottish] Cup finals, even though they didn’t go great, qualified for Europe and left the club five points behind second place.
‘We also went top of the league a couple of times. For me, that’s progress,’ he added.
Even so, it wasn’t all honey and light in Lothian as Hibs froze in the arc lights of back-to-back Cup finals
I believe Hibs progressed well when I was the boss
and were spanked 7-0 at home by Malmo in the Europa League last July.
Fenlon acknowledges those blips as ‘horrible times’ and says ‘I take responsibility for them. We had them at Bohs when we lost to TNS. You get knocks in football and you have to learn from them.
‘Looking back, in that first year when we stayed up, if we’d lost to Aberdeen in the Cup semi-finals, it might have been better for me,’ he half-joked.
Fenlon refused to respond to the baiting of O’Connor, once convicted of possessing cocaine and who ‘celebrated’ the 5-1 Scottish Cup final loss to rivals Hearts in 2012 by skulling beer on the team bus as it left Hampden.
He also declined to thump the table about the value of the two Cup runs, which generated £1million each year for Hibs through receipts, TV money and prize money.
Or point out how Hearts were paying £15,000 a week they couldn’t afford to players the year they won the Cup, and have since hit the financial buffers with relegation a certainty.
Hibs, i n contrast, were always a tightly-run ship on Fenlon’s watch, so ‘ tight’ that players who might have made a difference docked elsewhere.
Jon Daly, for instance, was a closeseason objective for Fenlon last summer but Rangers offered £3,500 per week plus a win bonus which blew Hibs out of the water.
Willo Flood, another target, was offered chunks more by Aberdeen.
Had they signed, this season might have been different and Fenlon might still be in harness, plotting for Sunday’s visit of champions Celtic, Sky Sports and all.
Instead, he has spent Christmas at home, caught up on family time, and enjoyed stints on the bike around Kilbride. But now, Fenlon is getting twitchy.
It’s mid- January, and he’s never been out of work at this time of the year, either as player, or manager in over 25 years. He is finding the lack of involvement ‘strange.’
But he will bounce back, because he always has.
It began on the streets of Finglas in the 70s, a pint-sized kid with a ball almost as big as himself.
The Dubs were on the march under Heffo but nothing beat being out on the road for Fenlon, for hours on end, t r apping, dribbling, shooting. He could slip ball through the l egs of opponents so cleverly he earned the nickname ‘Nutsy’. It stuck. At his shoulder, providing encouragement was his Da, Paddy, the most significant influence of Fenlon’s career, along with Brian Kerr, who signed him for St Pat’s.
Paddy was taken far too early, but he provided Fenlon with ‘the tools’ to deal with life’s setbacks, including the departure from Chelsea at 17, two broken legs before he turned 21, the bigotry taunts of ‘Paddy Fenian’ in the Irish League, a triple shin fracture at 29.
Fenlon has always had a tough hide. When he arrived at St Pat’s in 1987, he didn’t flinch when asked to help clear dead sheep from the ramshackle training ground behind the Shed End of ‘Richer.’
That he’d been at Chelsea cut no ice with Harry Boland, the legendary Saints groundsman, who ordered the teenager to fetch the milk and biscuits from the local shop, and ‘made me pay for it myself’.
Entering a dressing room full of hardened league heads such as Paddy Dillon, Mick Moody, Dave Henderson, Johnny McDonnell and Mark Ennis, Fenlon was challenged.
Parts of it were ‘horrendous’, Fenlon admits, but it was all ‘characterbuilding’ stuff which stood to him.
For 15 years, Fenlon graced Irish club football, harvesting three League of Ireland titles, two FAI Cups, plus an Irish League and Cup double at Linfield.
In that time, he converted from a left winger into a creative central midfielder before the opportunity of management knocked at Tolka Park under the late Ollie Byrne.
From being a buddy, Fenlon became the boss and was hooked. ‘ I t was hard t o go i nto t he dressing room and tell lads I’d been playing with we were going
Brian Kerr is ahead of his time, he has great vision
down a different route.
‘I think Ollie knew I had that in my make-up and it helped me in the long run because you have to make hard decisions as a manager. If you can’t do that, you’re going to struggle.’
As Shelbourne, and then Bohemians, straddled the Irish football landscape, Fenlon delivered five
league titles in seven years and led the Reds to within 90 minutes of the Champions League group stages.
It wasn’t always easy. At Shels he had many ructions with Byrne. One time, the players and staff were six weeks without money and Fenlon told Byrne they were all threatening to leave. Fine, said Byrne, go. They never did.
If Byrne exerted a huge pull on Fenlon, so too did Kerr, the great evangelist of Irish football.
‘Brian was ahead of his time,’ stressed Fenlon. ‘He can be cantankerous like a lot of us managers are, but his knowledge of the game, his vision, is immense. He’s too good not to be involved now.’
So too is Fenlon, who was chased by Dundee United and Peterborough before heeding Hibs’ call.
That call is silent now but Fenlon remains resilient. ‘When you get knocked down, you either stay down or you get back up on your feet and you go again. That’s what my Dad taught me. I’m ready to go again.’
At 44, Fenlon has many miles to travel, and is prepared to cast a line across Europe, and the United States, to net the next challenge.
‘ I ’ ve managed since I was 32 and I’d like to stay at a l evel that I can i mprove, and do something I can get my teeth into,’ he says. Already, the Airtricity League rumour mill is throbbing with speculation that Fenlon will replace the f i rst high- profile casualty of the new season.
But Fenlon seems non-committal about returning to the home front. ‘I don’t know, to be honest. I’ve managed Hibs, and I’d like to try and get back to a similar level.
‘I’m hoping to go back into management and I’m open into going into other areas as well.’
As he looks about the domestic scene, his ‘big passion’, Fenlon pines for the loss of Byrne.
‘Ollie had that vision and belief that the League of Ireland could get to a different level. I think that’s what’s lacking a bit now. The standard has dropped, the European results have dropped,’ he observed. So what is needed? ‘The clubs are big enough to have their own schoolboy section and it should be mandatory.
‘If the players are good enough to go away as schoolboys, they will go and the club will make some money. If they aren’t, they can stay on and play in the league. Either way, the club is onto a winner.
‘ We’ll always produce players because we have so many numbers, so the club will hit the jackpot once or twice.
‘As I see it, there is no system at League of Ireland clubs for young players to develop, there is no reserve league either... so many players each week are not getting a game.’
Any bright sparks who emerge will be noted by Ireland manager Martin O’Neill, who won’t snub the League like Giovanni Trapattoni did.
‘No one is saying we’ve loads of players in the League of Ireland for the senior team but potentially we might and i t’s great that Martin and Roy [Keane] have shown an i nterest. Look how many players in the squad have
Kids need to spend more time training with the ball
come through the league.’
A new blueprint for under-age coaching would help, according to Fenlon.
‘Players need to spend more time on the ball. As a kid I spent 10 hours out on the road with a ball; kids don’t seem to have that time now
‘I watch sessions and there are 15 balls on the sideline at times and one on the pitch for 16 players. They should all have a ball. Once you can master the ball, you can do anything.
‘We need kids to get more touches, like they do in Germany, Holland, to work on core skills. The first touch is massive in football. We don’t do enough work on it.’
With such views, should Fenlon not be in harness with the FAI?
‘I would work for anyone, if I felt I could make a difference. I feel I have plenty of experience, my track record is good, and I’d love to keep that going, either here or somewhere else.
‘Working for the FAI in the international side of things would interest me,’ he added. ‘In fairness, the likes of Noel King [U21s] and Paul Doolin [U19s] are doing good jobs. They are giving us respectability at that level.’
Fenlon has given more than respectability to Irish football, as a player and manager for over a quarter of a century and this unassuming yet fiercely driven Dub isn’t finished.
‘Football is mad, you know, and it’s getting even more mad. But I love it.’