PAUL HEFFERNAN: 'I think it's great that these players get a chance to play men's football before they go... ' | Bringing Bray back and developing young players for the future
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Well, delighted to be joined by the head coach of Bray Wanderers, Paul Heffernan. Paul, we can really start to feel the excitement building for another new season here today at the League of Ireland lunch. I suppose you spent most of your career in the UK, a very long and successful career. What have you made of the popularity of the League of Ireland since coming back home?
It was a shock to be honest because when I first came back I went into Cabin Thiele at the time and I was working with the strikers basically and if I'm honest of course you follow the League of Ireland and because I'm local you follow Bray Wonders would have been my local team growing up but it was an eye opener when I came back to see probably how it's grown in the last five years and how popular it's become and being involved in the first division is you know there's so many young players and it's almost like an under 23 league with every club and It's a funny thing, but you hear every manager after every game in the First Division saying, well, we're a young squad. Well, everybody's young.
Everybody's a young squad and everybody has young players. And I think it's great that these players get a chance to play proper men's football really before they go to have careers in England or into Europe or whatever it is. you know that even in the club where i am in braille the crowd has gone through the roof over over the last couple of years and as you see in the premier league with especially the dublin teams every game is more or less sold out every week so i mean it's growing and growing and it's getting bigger and bigger and getting more popular and it's fantastic for for the fans to go and watch but also when it's on tv on a friday night it gets people involved as well so for me it's it's the excitement there with people looking forward to go to games every weekend it's brilliant
How have you found the progression? Because did it kind of come out of nowhere, you moving up to head coach at Bray Wanderers?
What insights does Paul Heffernan share about the popularity of the League of Ireland?
How have you found that progression?
Yeah, so I was in, Ian Ryan was managing at the time and I was one of his coaches and Lachlan Fitzgerald was one of his coaches. And then Ian decided to leave and decided to move on. And we were kind of in the middle of the season there, so... Myself and Lorcan looked after it really and we thought and we said ourselves it's a stop cap until they find somebody else and then of course Lorcan left five that five games later he he moved on as well so I was kind of on my own then and Pat Devlin at the time and Tom Richardson the chairman like there was literally six games of the season left and we were in the last playoff spot so they said like will you look after it for the final six games of the season then
At that time, I had no intention of saying, yeah, I want a job. I said, yeah, I look after it for the last few games. We snuck into the playoffs. We ended up going through the playoffs and getting to the final where Drogheda beat us. And then I'd obviously got a little taste of it then and I had really enjoyed it and enjoyed working with the players. making your own decisions and being the main man basically when it comes to picking teams and squads and formations and then they offered me the job and asked me to take it on a full-time basis which I had to think about I didn't just dive in and say yeah I wanted it you know I'm still young and I still had a lot to learn but you don't know until you're thrown in there how much you'll enjoy it or how much success or whatever you'll have.
And when I decided to take it and kind of got my own players in last year, really, and got my own staff together with Graham Kelly and Gavin Tee and Steve McGuinness.
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