Tribesmen kick-off new campaign with home tie against Athlone Town

THE FAI has been getting as lot of flak in the past year or so after the wretched financial situation at football’s governing body came to light thanks to some exceptional journalism by Mark Tighe of the Sunday Times.

The newspaper won a High Court battle with John Delaney in March, defeating the former overlord’s attempts to be awarded a court injunction preventing Tighe from publishing a story about a €100,000 cheque he had given the FAI. We should be eternally grateful both to Tighe for his work, and to Judge Anthony Barr, who refused the injunction, setting in motion a series of revelations which exposed the duplicitous manner in which the FAI was being run.

But maybe we have been too quick to slam the Association for its ignorance and lack of intelligence, as it has appeared in the past few weeks that someone up in Abbotstown has been dipping into the works of the former Nobel Prize Literature winner, Portugal’s Jose Saramago.

In his 2002 novel, O Homem Duplicado (The Double), Saramago included the line “chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered”, and that can surely be the only explanation for the farcical situation in which the FAI has handled the fixture list for the 2020 First Division season, as ‘chaos’ is the only word that can describe it.

The FAI announced a fixture list on January 10 for a 10-team league that included Shamrock Rovers II, but not Limerick, with the first league game to be played on February 21; two weeks later, a new fixture list was announced for an 11-team league, which this time did include Limerick, but with a starting date of March 27 and then late last week, the original fixture list was reissued, again with no Limerick.

As a result, the season does start this Friday night, with Galway United hosting Athlone Town at Eamonn Deacy Park (7.45pm) in the first of their 27-game league schedule, and given the squad Alan Murphy has put together, United surely need to be challenging for promotion by the time September rolls around.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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