There are many subplots attached to Dundalk’s trip to Richmond Park to face St Patrick’s Athletic on Bank Holiday Monday.
The meeting, which will be broadcast live on Virgin Media, will see new Lilywhites manager Jon Daly return to the club he led to the FAI Cup last season while Stephen Kenny, the man who oversaw the greatest period in Dundalk’s history, will be in the opposite dugout, trying to land a blow on a ‘special club that will always remain a big part of my life.’
If Daly, who left Pat’s less than four weeks ago, has first-hand knowledge of how his former players operate, then it’s safe to say that Kenny knows one of the Dundalk players better than anyone, his son Eoin, who came off the bench in Dundalk’s 0-0 draw with Derry City on Friday night.
The presence of the 18-year-old Leaving Cert student, who signed a professional deal with the club that he supports in March of last year, adds another layer of intrigue to the fixture.
“It’ll be a special moment for my family to see us competing against each other,” said Eoin, “but football’s football, you just have to put it aside for the 90 minutes.
“It’ll be a bit awkward at home over the weekend. We won’t be talking about the game much and we’ll be trying to keep everything away from each other,” he smiled.
Stephen Kenny, pictured with his two sons, Eóin, left, then aged 10, and Fionn, aged 12 after Dundalk lifted the SSE Airtricity League title in October 2016. Photo by David Maher/Sportsfile
“Things have just fallen into place for it to happen but I’ll just be focused on winning, and that’s all he’ll be focused on. Both of us just want to win and then we’ll have a bit of banter after it, especially the one who gets the better of it. And that will hopefully be us.”
The 12-minute cameo against Derry was Kenny’s seventh appearance of the campaign and he said he was looking forward to gleaning bits of information off his new manager, a former striker in his own right who paired up with the youngster in shooting practice during the week.
“Jon had a great playing career and he similar to myself, a big centre forward so I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from him over my time and he’ll give me some great advice. It’s good to be learning off, and taking instructions off somebody like that.”
All of the players have really enjoyed it and I think that showed in our performance against Derry. The stuff that we worked on definitely came to fruition. We created a lot of chances so we are disappointed we didn’t win it but there were a a lot of positives to take from it going into Pat’s on Monday.”
