David McMillan feels the FAI took the wrong approach to the postponement of St Patrick's Athletic's SSE Airtricity Men's Premier Division clash with Dundalk last Sunday.
The game was set take place between the two legs of Pat's Conference League play-off clash with Istanbul Basaksehir, but was postponed on Friday for what the FAI called, 'a unique opportunity' for two clubs from the league to be involved in Europe until Christmas.
The Inchicore club have never qualified for the group stage of a European competition, but Thursday's gutsy scoreless draw at Tallaght, where they had the better chances to score, has given them a fighting chance heading to Wednesday's second leg in Turkey.
Saints manager Stephen Kenny had been strong on his belief that the game with his former club Dundalk should have been postponed before the first leg at Tallaght, calling it "insane" and "hard to fathom".
And he doubled down on his view after his side earned the impressive draw, suggesting that if the FAI is "serious and ambitious" about Irish clubs progressing in Europe, then they needed to intervene and postpone the game.
Less than 24 hours later, that's exactly what happened.
Dundalk were not impressed. Manager Jon Daly, who started the season in charge of the Super Saints before being fired in March, called the decision "farcical" in a statement released by the club.
"From a football point of view, we will have gone 21 days without a competitive game," Daly continued.
"That is completely unacceptable at a stage of the season where we have just nine fixtures to play.
"The issue of sporting integrity also has to be called into question. Clubs in and around us have already had - and will have - the benefit of playing clubs on the back of European fixtures. There is zero consistency.
"We constantly hear about how we need to grow the league and make it more professional but this decision makes it look anything but."
And for McMillan, who played under Kenny at Dundalk, the seemingly "ad hoc" approach from the FAI is unacceptable.
"The timing is horrendous," he said on the RTÉ Soccer Podcast.
"If the decision was made when Pat's qualified, I don't think anybody would have kicked up too much of a fuss.
"Obviously, Dundalk still wouldn't have been happy about it. They want to play a tired Pat's team. Realistically, Pat's would have had to change nearly their whole 11 to try and to face Dundalk [had the game gone ahead on Sunday] because it's a quick turnaround in six days.
"It looks like the FAI have just said, 'if Pat's lose heavily here on Thursday, we won't bother calling it off, and if they have a chance, we'll call it off', which is just the wrong approach totally.
"I would love to know when those Turkish teams that have the weekend off, I'd say that decision was way made well in advance, or maybe it's an agreed thing every year, that that's the approach they take, whereas with us, it's ad hoc. It's make the decision on a whim, put out a statement."
McMillan says that there has to be consistency on the matter going forward, with Shamrock Rovers guaranteed group soccer themselves for the rest of the year.
In his time with the Lilywhites, they had to play a Europa League game against Zenit St Petersburg, and the FAI Cup final in the space of four days.
McMillan says that extra games, at a higher quality, are part and parcel of being a successful club, but that success can't come at the expense of other clubs in the League of Ireland.
"We understood it was it's part of being successful is you have to play regularly, you have to play a lot of games.
"We lost the Cup final off the back of it. But you accept this. You be successful, you have a lot of matches to play and and that's part and parcel of the game.
"And Pat's have a good enough squad to deal with both of those things but I think it's just all about the timing, it looks terrible.
"And I can understand why Dundalk feel very aggrieved about it, and other teams as well. Rovers in the past have looked for games off where they were going through their European rounds, and they didn't get it.
"So it doesn't look great."
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