Time for cool heads as Blues move to bottom

Wednesday, 25th April 2007

A goal scored by Dave Mooney after 24 minutes was good enough to send Waterford United crashing to the bottom of the league table on Friday night. Flancare Park has never been a happy hunting ground for Waterford teams in the past and that trend continued on this occasion. Following an opening day victory over Cork City, the form of this Blues team has gone from bad to worse, apart from a decent display against Derry City the previous week. A defence that leaks goals, especially from set pieces, failure to score goals and generally a lack of confidence when the other team scores has proved costly and now the question that is being asked is would this current squad of players be better off playing in the First Division?

From what we have seen during the past two months the answer to that question in without doubt YES. Manager Gareth Cronin must have killed a lot of black cats when he travelled to Waterford to take over the chair that was occupied by Mike Kerley before him. He took charge of a group of players who did not know the meaning of the word victory and despite the fact that they put in a few half decent displays they finished in the relegation area and were demoted to the lower division. No one blamed Cronin because it was not his team and he had to try and make a silk purse from a sows ear.

During the close season he signed a fair deal of players who he felt were good enough to win Division One but almost beyond belief he then found out he would be managing those players in the Premier League when Shelbourne went belly up and were removed from the top flight. The manager was put in a no win situation. He had built a team for the wrong division.