The rain is belting down outside and so when Richie Towell arrives bone dry, somebody asks about the venue for the photographs he's just had taken to go with his latest SSEAirtricity/Soccer Writers' Player of the Month award.
“Yeah,” he replies, good-naturedly, “normally we head down to the garden but . . . ”
“Oh, ‘normally’, is it now?” replies one of the reporters amid a fair bit of laughter but the 23-year-old had a point. These personal honours are becoming a bit routine for the Dundalk midfielder.
Towell’s performances last season put him right up there for the various player of the season gongs but if the current campaign finished this morning, he’d probably the only runner in a one-horse race.
From midfield in a team that has plenty of players who would fancy themselves to have a go in or around the box, he has 10 goals already, with seven coming from five games played in the month for which he got yesterday’s prize.
“It’s been amazing,” he says. “You go though little patches and this seems to be a golden patch for me. Everything I hit seems to be going into the back of the net. Obviously, [I’m having] a bit of a drought now,” he continues with a laugh, “not scoring against Longford, but hopefully I can rectify that this weekend.”
His goals have helped Dundalk set a blistering pace as they move towards the halfway point in their title defence. As he talks through the league table and the scale of the club’s lead over Cork, Shamrock Rovers and, in particular, St Patrick’s Athletic (who are 10 points behind) he sounds, in one breath, as if he can scarcely believe it before, in the next, seeming to suggest that the collective effort being put in by Stephen Kenny’s squad makes it all pretty inevitable.
“We’re a very hungry side,” he says, “that’s one thing I would say about us. We never get complacent. We’re always working hard. I think we’ve trained harder this week than we have since I first came in.”
Towell’s personal dedication to the cause is entirely apparent but Kenny is certainly a big influence and there is an obvious warmth to the way he speaks about the manager even when having a bit of a laugh at his expense.
With understandable relish, for instance, he tells the story of Kenny’s promise to the squad in the dressingroom before the recent win at Turner’s Cross.
‘Team talk’
“I’d scored a hat-trick against Galway and he said in the pre-match team talk in Cork that if I kept scoring like that, he’d buy the whole team these boots (his rather pricey match-day ones) to see if they could do the same.
“Well, I scored the two goals and all the lads were buzzing but he had the calculator out after the game. I think he got a shock when he saw so much they were so I don’t think he’d be buying 20 odd pairs.”
