Mathews delighted to be back in football

Alan Mathews expressed his delight at being back in football management, after being unveiled as the new manager of Drogheda United on Wednesday afternoon. Mathews has signed a two-year contract with the Boynesiders and is faced with the immediate challenge of getting a team together for Drogheda’s Malone Cup clash with local rivals Dundalk on Saturday week.

"I'm absolutely delighted to be back in the game," Mathews enthused. "This is a different chapter in the club's history, I would imagine. This year, I would hope to galvanise a team of people who have something to prove, who will be coming to Drogheda United to play in the Premier Division, to experience one of the best training facilities in the country and to play on probably the best surface in the country.

“But who may also have something to prove themselves; if they’ve been released by other clubs or other managers might not have fancied them, or if they have come back from England and want to push on and progress their career. I have experience of taking those kind of players in in my first couple of seasons with Longford Town. Clubs like Drogheda came calling and took them off us over the years, and that was a measure of the attitude and the ability of the players, but, more importantly, that they used the opportunity that they had to progress their careers as footballers.

“I’ve already spoken to a number of players. There’s an awful lot of players still out of work. I’ve done my homework over the last couple of days and I’ve identified players. That’s already begun, so, hopefully, we’ll have a crew of people up training very, very quickly, and we’ll work from there. I’m confident that I’ll be able to put together a squad of players to give us ample time to prepare for the new season. It’s not ideal. You’re coming in today when we would have been back in pre-season maybe three weeks ago. But a lot of the guys that are still not sorted out are training with other clubs.

“There will be a lot of changes. You’ll probably find that the people that will come in early on may not be the people that will be with the club going forward. But they’ll come in and, for whatever reason, they might move on. It will be an opportunity for players to showcase how good they are, if they’ve not been given an opportunity elsewhere. It will be hard but I’m confident enough that we can get together a squad that can compete. The challenge is to put together a side that can be competitive.

“It’s a different goal set for me now. I have to set my mind in a slightly different way, but I’ve done that before. Cork was an opportunity for me to win a league, but that wasn’t to be, for various reasons. This year, what I want to do is get the team to be competitive, to challenge and to make sure that we survive, but more importantly, to get the club on the road to where it needs to go back to.

“As a manager, you always have different ambitions and aspirations. I’ll be full-time, albeit in a part-time situation. I’ll help off the training ground as much as I can. From a training point of view, it will be part-time, but you can be part-time in name and professional in attitude, and I’d like to think that the people that we bring in will reflect that professional attitude.”

Mathews has already spoken to two people in relation to the Assistant Manager’s position and is expected to appoint someone to that role in the coming days. He will also sit down with a number of players with a view to beginning pre-season training as soon as possible, as Drogheda enter their first warm-up game of 2009 with the visit of Dundalk to United Park on Saint Valentine‘s night. It was also stated at today’s press conference that the club is confident of attaining a Premier Division licence for the coming season.

In other Drogheda news, Vincent Hoey has stepped down from his position as club chairman and has been replaced by Jim McArdle. “As of today, I’ll cease to be the chairman of Drogheda United,” Hoey stated. “I’m pleased to say that the chairmanship has been handed over to a man as I’ve described as a very safe pair of hands. He’s a man who has great experience of being our Licensing Officer and who knows the workings of the club, and he has been a stalwart in our past years of success. I want to ask everybody to give him wholehearted support. I intend to do so and I appeal to everybody to get behind him and the new Board of Management. They have thought out their plans well. We have to cut our cloth according to the measure now and deal with the real world as it is.”