I was sitting in one of the best stadiums in the country last Friday night watching Shamrock Rovers take on St Patrick's Athletic, when news filtered through that the game between Athlone Town and UCD had been stopped 30 minutes in due to floodlight failure.
Neither Athlone nor the FAI have released a statement to date explaining what happened, leaving many questions unanswered.
Athlone‘s own Twitter page didn’t even mention the fact that the lights had gone out or that the game had been delayed.
Stories like this overshadow the good work being done by the majority of League of Ireland clubs, but to continue to turn a blind eye to the glaring problems and weaknesses of some clubs is naïve.
Athlone Town AFC are currently the weakest link in the league and have been involved in a number of embarrassing incidents in recent times.
Friday night was the third time in three seasons that their floodlights have failed to work.
This coupled with the match fixing allegations from last season and other negative headlines is very damaging to a club which has been steeped in Irish football history.
They finished bottom of the First Division table in 2017, winning just four of 28 matches. They conceded 78 goals and finished with a goal difference of minus 50.
They’ve begun this season in similar fashion with four defeats from four, conceding 15 goals and scoring just three.
Aaron Callaghan had to start an 18-year-old midfielder, Luke Kelly, in goal for their 3-1 loss to Cabinteely on Monday, as his goalkeepers were unavailable for a variety of reasons.
This is unheard of in the League of Ireland.
Team sheet for today's game between Athlone Town AFC and Cabinteely FC pic.twitter.com/EI5qXTmPqf
— Athlone Town AFC (@AthloneTownAFC) March 19, 2018
How is anyone expected to support Athlone, sponsor them or risk associating themselves with the club after what has gone on?
The comparison can be made to near neighbours Longford Town here.
While Athlone Town Stadium is only 26 miles from Town’s City Calling Stadium, the two are poles apart when it comes to standards being set on and off the pitch.
According to the FAI website: "The licensing system was introduced in 2004 to ensure that the clubs participating in the League of Ireland were maintaining certain standards…. Licensing monitors clubs in five key areas: sporting, infrastructure, legal, personnel and administrative, and finance…the licensing system has helped to bring about a culture of improvement within the League of Ireland."
This is clearly not the case when it comes to Athlone and raises serious questions about the licensing process.
Friday’s floodlight failure is not the first time this season that a game has been affected, after Drogheda’s match against Finn Harps on the opening weekend of the season was postponed minutes before kick-off as the lights were deemed substandard.
Given these problems, it is hard to understand how these clubs were given licenses in the first place.
Seeing that our season begins in March, working floodlights for night games are a minimum requirement but in the cases of Athlone and Drogheda, this seems to have been overlooked, or not considered at all!
Every club needs to demand a standard from themselves, and secondly, our governing body needs to ensure that its own club licensing rules designed to "maintain certain standards" are being adhered to. Checking and ensuring the floodlights are working in all grounds is not too much to ask.
We can have Seanie Maguire potentially scoring goals in the Ireland senior team, we can have Dundalk winning games in the Europa League, we can have over 4,000 Cork City fans at a rocking Turner’s Cross on a Bank Holiday Monday, but it appears we cannot have a First Division season without controversy.
It will be an interesting few weeks ahead for Athlone Town AFC and their manager Aaron Callaghan.
I worked with Aaron for two years at UCD, he is an excellent coach and a good man.
I have sympathy for the situation he finds himself in, especially after ‘Sporting Director’ Roddy Collins, who brought Aaron into the club just a few months ago, walked away after the opening game of the season.
I’d love to see a change in Athlone‘s fortunes, but at the moment Aaron and his players are swimming against the tide.
The club needs to start respecting itself before anyone else will….
