Player recruitment will be key to Stephen O'Donnell’s success at St Patrick’s Athletic, says former Saints captain Johnny McDonnell.
Former Dundalk midfielder O’Donnell was recently unveiled as the new manager of the Inchicore club and while the Saints enjoyed a winning start under the new regime, beating Finn Harps 2-1, further success will be aided greatly by bringing the right players to the club, according to McDonnell.
"I think he will bring all the experience and knowledge from Dundalk into the job," said McDonnell, speaking on this week's RTE Soccer Podcast.
"Bringing it as a player and then doing it as a coach is different. As a player you can be a leader in the dressing but it is different."
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Natually, budgets will depend on what sort of squad that the 33-year-old rookie can assemble for the 2020 campaign, but McDonnell believes that the new coach has a major advantage coming from his role in Dundalk where he was involved with player analysis.
"It might depend on budgets, but he may also look at the template that brought success to Dundalk when Stephen [Kenny] went there, they didn’t have a big budget. They did it by getting the right recruitment.
"He has been working in recruitment and knows every single player in the league, so he will probably know what players he wants to bring in as he did all the video analysis at Dundalk as a recruitment officer.
"That will be a big advantage for him. He won’t have the budget that Dundalk [currently] have so he will try to recruit the proper players, get them into Europe and then build from there.
"Young and inexperienced, I have to say, but so was Pat Fenlon when he went into Shelbourne."
And former Faroe Islands assistant manager McDonnell had some advice for the new man at Richmond Park.
"You can’t expect the players to be the player that you were. He can only guide them and point them in the right direction."
