It was all brave faces and confident talk around Oriel Park yesterday as the officials at Dundalk Football Club attempted to smooth over the dramatic events of Thursday night.
Then their team had beaten National League champions St Patrick's Athletic only to have their celebrations in the dressing room dampened somewhat by the news that, if the right offers came in for any of them, several of them might well be on their way out of the club over the coming weeks.
The announcement, which was followed by a long and, at times, emotional meeting involving some of the club's directors and supporters came at the end of a week when there had been some speculation that the club, or more precisely the company that operates it, might once again be heading for liquidation.
Yesterday, though, chairman Phil Flynn was adamant that the current board were determined to avoid having to go down that particular avenue and that the decision to offer all of the players for sale had been taken with that in mind. The aim, he said, is not to sell all of the best players but rather to see what offers come in and to allow manager Jim McLaughlin to decide how to make the cutbacks required.
"It's a sad an unfortunate situation," said Flynn, "but it's a commercial reality that we are not, as a company, in a position at the moment to meet our outgoings." The club's financial controller, Jim Murphy, insisted that the targets that the board have now set themselves as they attempt to turn the club around are "very attainable", but it is not clear how much of what Flynn said was a £150,000 players' wage bill has to be cut and how much additional revenue is to be raised by improving other areas of the club's operations.
The club is believed to have sought advice from St Patrick's Athletic on how to generate more funds, however, and it seems likely that the board will aim to install a full-time general manager before the start of next season.
What happens between now and then will be of immediate concern to the club's fans, though. Results so far this season, with the notable exception of Thursday's win, have been extremely disappointing and now they are contemplating the loss of key players like Ray Campbell and Steve Williams.
Flynn maintained that no eventuality could be ruled out, saying at one point that the club would play with an amateur side next year if it came to that, but Jim McLaughlin said that for the moment he would simply wait and see what happens. McLaughlin's position at the club has been in doubt for some time now and the manager who enjoyed tremendous success in his first stint as the Oriel Park boss is said to have tired of the job. There have also been calls for his resignation from amongst the club's supporters but he is reported to have agreed to stay on in order to see the club through what promises a particularly difficult period.
The fact that, as Honorary Treasurer Paddy Malone points out, Dundalk took less in gate receipts during the whole of last season than either Shelbourne or St Patrick's received from their series of Cup matches against each other gives an idea of the scale of the problem, however, and an alarming insight into how the fortunes of the league's most successful club over the past couple of decades have taken a terrible turn for the worse.
