Derry City and St Pat's Athletic look to Patrick Hoban and Ruairí Keating for goal rush

Recent FAI Cup wins have made Derry City and St Patrick's Athletic smile, if only for a while, but league titles are required to make them feel whole again.

Derry have gone 26 years without a league tile win while St Pat’s are now ten years since they last brought the trophy back home to Inchicore. Both clubs showed themselves capable of being league-winning material for long parts of last season but will be looking to go the full distance in 2024.

They both may feel that the addition of a new centre-forward could be what makes their dreams come true. Those men are Patrick Hoban and Ruairí Keating.

Winning an FAI Cup has often been a step on the way to becoming a league winner so can the teams of Ruaidhri Higgins and Jon Daly follow the below in quickly adding league to cup success?

Derry started last season impressively and led the way as the season hit the mid-point at May's end. Although still a long way to go, only four times in the 21-year summer era have the team leading with half the games played not gone on to win the title (Derry 2006, St Pat’s 2010, Cork City 2018 and St Pat’s in 2021).

But a run of one win in seven through the end of June left them six points behind and never looked like getting back on top. That decline started with them managing just one goal in the first four games. This was the crystallisation of goal-scoring problems that held them back all year, they finished as just the fourth best scorers and a tally 10 goals fewer than Shamrock Rovers.

The solution Derry have identified to this problem is signing the second-leading goal scorer in the summer era (122 goals) who is top 25 all-time in the history of the league.

That is Patrick Hoban. After a couple of down years by his high standards, Hoban scored 14 league goals in 2023 with only two players ahead of him as Jack Moylan and Jonathan Afolabi got 15. As both of those players have left the league this year, Derry have unquestionably signed the most proven goalscorer available.

Signing a player of Hoban’s experience (231 appearances) should provide a smooth transition anyway but that should be helped by joining a team with five players in midfield (Cameron Dummigan, Patrick McEleney, Michael Duffy, Will Patching and Daniel Kelly) who he has played with before at Dundalk. All bar Dummigan have even assisted goals in his career.

Where the Candystripes particularly struggled was getting shots on target. They did so 34.7% of the time, only better than three other teams. Hoban is a ready-made solution as he has made the keeper work at least 40% of the time in each of the last four seasons.

He will be expected to make a difference for a club whose top scorer last year (Jordan McEneff) had eight goals and who haven’t had a player score double figure league goals in consecutive seasons since Rory Patterson scored 18 in 2013 and 10 the year after.

It has been a quiet winter transfer window to date showing that Higgins feels like Hoban is the one missing piece from the puzzle to make his team complete.

Like Derry, Pat’s put together a long stretch of results that would be good enough to win a league title, just not for a full season. In the case of the Saints, it was a strong finish to the campaign.

Their turning point came with the appointment of Jon Daly as manager on 2 May after a home loss to Sligo Rovers. It was a third defeat in a row without scoring and left them seventh.

From then to the end of the season, they had the league’s second-best record and were just three points less well-off than Shamrock Rovers. It could have been better but for losses in both south Dublin derbies.

Something that significantly changed under Daly was how positive his side were going forward in terms of taking shots. Under Clancy, they averaged 9.4 attempts per game but this rose to 11.9 after the managerial change. It came without resorting to reckless shooting from long range as their average shot distance only marginally increased from 19.52 yards to 19.87.

This was despite their average possession going from 53.03% down to 49.24%. Pat’s lost possession in the final third 60 times per game with Clancy but just 52 times for Daly as they made better use of their attacks.

Despite this, their leader in shots per game (Chris Forrester 2.04) had just the 24th most in the league highlighting a need to bring in a forward who could shoulder this burden. Conor Carty played most regularly up front but took just 1.93.

They relied heavily on the goals of Chris Forrester whose 13 were six more than next best Mark Doyle. Not many teams can win a league title relying on the goals of a 31-year-old central midfielder who averaged four goals per season in his first four years after returning from the UK.

In comes Ruairí Keating from Cork City who was fourth in the league for total shots taken (75) but for a Cork City side who had the third-lowest possession rate. Crucially he made those shots count as he hit the target at a 41% rate. It allowed him to significantly outperform his xG of 9.38 with 13 balls ending in the back of the net.

The Galwegian finished behind only Moylan, Afolabi and Hoban for total goals scored and only behind Afolabi for non-penalty goals. He is just the second player in the last 15 years (after Vinny Faherty of Limerick in 2015) to be relegated when finishing in the top five of the goal charts.

Although Keating doesn’t have the career pedigree of Hoban, he has amassed 49 League of Ireland goals across both divisions from just 126 starts.

We mentioned earlier Pat’s poor head-to-head record against Shamrock Rovers and the title race could’ve been tighter if they had taken more than their one point (going back further it is five from 36 available). But Keating could change that as he scored the only goal in a win for Cork against the champions last year and another in helping them to a draw in Tallaght.

Like Derry, the Saints have struggled to find a regular talisman. Since Christy Fagan’s 20-goal 2014 season they didn’t have anyone score more than 11 until Eoin Doyle put away 14 in 2022.

It’s unusual to see two such accomplished scorers move clubs in the same off-season. They could be the twists that shake up the status quo at the top of the tree.

Shamrock Rovers have shown that a prolific player isn’t an essential requirement to top the league with Graham Burke lead scoring on 11 and 12 goals in the last two seasons. But for two clubs who have been failing to topple Shamrock Rovers and before them Dundalk for many years, perhaps Hoban or Keating can be the perfect marriages to turn them into the ones in 2024.

Follow the RTÉ Sport WhatsApp channel for the best news, interviews, analysis and features, as well as details of our sports coverage across all RTÉ platforms.