Meet the man who won the League of Ireland with Shelbourne, Shamrock Rovers and Derry City

Shelbourne face St Patrick's Athletic tonight while Doolin's old clubs Drogheda United and Derry City face off at Weavers Park.

Asking Paul Doolin about his most memorable title victory is a little like quizzing him about the identity of his favourite child.

As a player he won the double twice with Shamrock Rovers, then the treble with Derry City, and then, in the Indian Summer of his career, he collected a fourth league and cup double with Shelbourne. Only three people won leagues with those teams, the same three sides battling it out for this year’s championship. Manager Jim McLaughlin was one, Mick Neville another, and then there was Doolin.

Initially, he was a League of Ireland version of Ray Houghton, industrious, clever, creative, right-sided. Time passed. His legs slowed. He moved inside, a CDM before the term was ever born. At Shels, Dermot Keely called him the best pro he worked with. Later as manager of Drogheda, Doolin then became one of the best managers in the league, too, guiding the Louth club to their only ever league title. So tonight, with three of his former clubs vying for the title, and one of those, Derry, playing at Drogheda, he’s in an authoritative position to share his views on what it takes to progress from contenders to champions.

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Doolin said: “It’s like anything, winning a League. When you do it once, you grow in confidence. You know what it takes. So, inside all three dressing rooms now will be leaders who’ll be telling the rest of the players: ‘don’t be worrying, we can do this’.

“Rovers have a dressing room full of those players; Derry have about five who have done it, Shelbourne only two. That doesn’t mean you rule Shelbourne out. The truth is you don’t rule out anyone. Yes, Shels have been drawing a lot of games recently, Rovers winning them, but is it momentum that you want now or is it a four-point lead? Any manager would tell you, they’d rather have the points banked.”

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That is what Drogheda had in 2007. Never before had they been in that position, chased by the rest, burdened by the pressure of having the hopes and dreams of a town resting on their shoulders. “It’s like anything,” said Doolin, “we had a sticky spell midway through the season. Some people were jittery. That’s when, as a manager, you had to trust in your beliefs and in yourself. That’s what Damien (Duff), Stephen (Bradley) and Ruaidhri (Higgins) will be thinking now, that they believe in what they are about.

“I remember that 2007 season like it was yesterday. We had meetings following the sticky patch. The players were great. They realised they had to play under the stress. They figured out that if they were going to win the league, then they had to beat everyone.

“So, move that into the context of this season. Shels play Rovers and Derry in their run-in. It’s in their hands, not anyone else’s. It’s there for them. But if you want to win the league, you have to beat your rivals. To be fair, they did beat Rovers twice this season.”

He remembers each of his five League of Ireland titles with fondness. The two won at Shamrock Rovers had a different vibe to the ones he picked up at Derry and Shels. At Rovers, they were heavy favourites, chasing a four in a row.

Next came Derry. He joined them in 1988, at a time when the city was going through political turmoil with the football club was experiencing a renaissance.

Doolin said: “Sport always seemed to be exempt from The Troubles. It was never talked about by any of us. We saw ourselves as footballers, not as anything else. For Derry people it was an outlet. They’d been out of senior football for years and yet here they were, back in elite football again, ripping it up.

“It was a brilliant time in my life. To play in front of 8,000 people for each home game; to be there when the city was alive with joy for its football team, it was an amazing feeling. Jim, I’m sure, felt pressure because it was his home-town club and the expectation was so high.

“But he dealt with it. That’s what managers and players have to do. You can’t ignore the pressure. You can’t pretend it isn’t there because it is. At Drogheda, directors or fans would ask, ‘are we going to do it?’

“And the only way to answer that is by delivering on the pitch. I’m not embarrassed to say you need a wee bit of luck sometimes, too. Sometimes, you just need to find a way to do it, to find a way to win. The best teams always do.”

Right now Rovers are the form team in the League. But sometimes a champion winning side needs the best manager. “You have to keep calm; you have to make sure that no one can see if you are getting anxious. Most of all you have to believe in yourself and in your players.”

They all do.

And yet something about Rovers’ late charge is alerting Doolin to previous events, like when Bohs came from nowhere to win the 2001 league. “A team on a roll is a dangerous team. Don’t rule Rovers out,” he says. But if they lose tonight, and Shels win, then we’ll have to. In many ways, tonight’s round of fixtures is the most important of the season.

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