Nightmares are Inevitable - Flanagan

Dundalk vice-captain John Flanagan has admitted that he will have plenty of nightmares if the Lilywhites’ dreams of promotion are extinguished this weekend. The Oriel outfit have thrice let five-point leads at the summit slip, while they have also thrown away separate seven and eight-point advantages over current leaders Shelbourne during the course of the campaign. Now, with just one game remaining, Dundalk’s destiny lies in the hands of others, and should Shels lay a second hand on the title, Flanagan will have more than one missed opportunity to relive and lose sleep over.

“There’ll always be regrets if we don’t win it,” Flano admits to dundalkfc.com. “If Shels do win, everybody will analyse it and there’ll be dissections and autopsies all over the place; ‘we could have won here and we dropped a point there’. But, really, if we don’t win it, it is our own fault. We dropped a few silly points along the way. There is no one particular game or patch - it’s just a collection of things. As a group, we know we probably should have done better and had it over and done with by now.

“We were maybe unlucky in a couple of games where we played very well and battered teams. We drew 0-0 with Longford here earlier in the season when it could have been 5-0. It’s games like that that would more stick in my mind more, where we played well and didn’t get what we deserved. In the games we lost recently, we didn’t play well and we got what we deserved. As a whole, I think we’ve done well, but we set ourselves a goal of winning the league and if we don’t achieve that, well, then we haven’t lived up to our own expectations and that will be very disappointing.

“I think the only way we can approach this weekend’s game is to go out and win. The worst case scenario would be that we don’t do our work and Shels slip-up. From our point of view, it’s the same old, same old; go out and try to win the game and see what happens. Whatever happens in the Shelbourne game shouldn’t affect us on-the-pitch. If we don’t win our own game, we have no chance, so we’ll just go out, as we do every week, with our sole focus on getting three points.

“Limerick are a good side, they showed that here. They prefer playing away from home. I think the two boys up front will cause any defence problems. Shels have everything to lose and Limerick have everything to gain, so it’s going to be a tight game. At the end of the day, if Limerick hold them, a draw could be good enough for us. But, again, the main focus for us is to just win our game.

“The mood in the camp has been great this week. Training on Tuesday night was quick and sharp, and I think there’s a belief there that if we go and do our job that things will happen elsewhere for us. Kildare is always a tough place to go, we know that. They have a new manager in and they’ve picked up a few points in the last couple of weeks, but we’re well capable of going down there and getting the win.”

In March 2002, Flanagan entered a similar end of season scenario with Dundalk, though, on that day, Premier Division survival was at stake. Needing to win in Monaghan, the Lilywhites kept their part of the deal, however, Longford Town, only just, earned the point that they required at home to Saint Patrick’s Athletic. The Louth club have been in the lower tier ever since, but Flano is hoping for a better swing of fortune this time around.

“That’s going back a long time now, but even during that game, we didn’t know what was happening elsewhere,” John recalls. “We heard a few shouts from the bar in Monaghan and that, but we’ve just got to worry about ourselves. Maybe, Limerick will do us a favour, maybe they won’t, but whatever happens, we want to go out on a winning note. We went down to Monaghan that day and we done our own work, things obviously didn’t work out for us elsewhere, but, hopefully, this week, we can go and get another three points and it will be enough to win us the league.”

Flano has also confirmed that there is no chance of a U-turn on his recent decision to retire from football come the final whistle in Kildare. “Not after last week, I couldn’t go back on that,” he states. “I don’t think I’ll ever get a chance to go out on a night like that again, so I don’t think there’ll be any reversal. This Saturday is the end of a long run for me. Last Thursday was a very emotional night, saying goodbye to everybody, but down in Kildare, it will just be business as usual. All the niceties and the emotional stuff of leaving Oriel is gone, so it’s just another game that we have to go out and try to win.”