Paul Fennessy

A DEJECTED Brian Murphy summed up Waterford’s frustration at the climax of last season.

“It breaks my heart,” he told reporters. “I came home to play for my hometown club and that’s possibly my last game.’

Waterford had just been beaten by UCD in the promotion-relegation playoff final.

It had been a dramatic season for the club.

A disastrous start saw the coaching team of Kevin Sheedy and Mike Newell leave after nine games.

The side gradually improved thereafter under Marc Bircham and looked capable of pulling off a great escape, only for the former QPR player to be controversially sacked in the days leading up to their most important game.

The off-the-field disruption appeared to have an impact, as the side briefly managed by former Tottenham player Ian Hendon were deservedly beaten by the Students on the night.

Yet despite the lows of that moment, a fresh season has brought a sense of optimism back to Waterford.

As one of three full-time teams in the First Division alongside Cork City and Galway, they will be among the favourites to gain promotion.

“That’s what we’re looking to do,” says new boss Ian Morris. “We’ll set up. We’ll try as best we can and we’ll put all our effort into it. That’s the goal. There’s no grey area on that side of things. When you look around the league, you can see how well managers have done putting squads together. It’s going to be a fantastically competitive league. And it’s exciting. The season tickets when you look around the league as well, they’ve gone up and hopefully, the crowds will increase and that’ll add to a fantastic atmosphere on match nights.”

Morris knows what it takes to escape Irish football’s second tier. The 34-year-old has twice managed Shelbourne to league title wins, including overseeing their success last season.

However, the latter achievement surprisingly wasn’t enough to save his job, as the Tolka Park outfit opted to go in a different direction.

“You need to be tough, you need to be resilient, you need to be able to grind results out as well as be dominant,” he says. “We’ve got really exciting players top end of the pitch, we’re hoping for goals. We’d be confident of going out and creating a lot of chances in every game and keeping as many clean sheets as we can. It’s a really tough, dogged league. When you look at some of the players, there’s real quality in the squads this year, if you look at the squad lists, there are players that can hurt you at both ends [of the table].”

Waterford, of course, have a proud League of Ireland history. With six top-flight titles, only five clubs — Shamrock Rovers (19), Dundalk (14), Shelbourne (13), Bohemians (11) and St Patrick’s Athletic (8) — have won more.

However, all of these triumphs occurred between 1966 and 1973, while their most recent of two FA Cup wins was in 1980.

Morris consequently faces an immense challenge as he looks to restore the glory days, but that sense of potential was part of what drew the manager to the club in the first place.

“The city, the crowd size, the facilities, being full-time and then looking at the core group that potentially we were going to keep and who we would add to it as well. All of that just falls into place. So I think it’s a sleeping giant. Once we get moving again, hopefully, we’ll get back to where we should be.”

One of his immediate tasks was convincing key squad members to stay on the back of the chaotic end to last season.

“When I took over there at Christmas week, it was a scramble, straight on the phone, speaking to lads, trying to just convince them and tell them what way we want to go about things and luckily, we got to keep the bulk of the squad. We had a good footing and we’ve added quality to it as well. And hopefully, that’s going to lead to a successful year.

“[The players] obviously wanted something set in stone. I think that’s why nothing was announced before [regarding contracts], they wanted to see what was happening, what was changing, what was going to be in place. That’s my job, to show it, and I think we’ve had a fairly stable pre-season and a good routine. Training has been very good, the staff have been different class and the players have lived up to what they need to be, so all in all, I can’t really complain.

“We had a bad injury [recently], which will rule Killian [Cantwell] out anyway. Other than that, it’s been a good pre-season.”

And as for the aforementioned Brian Murphy, whose former clubs include QPR, Ipswich Town and Portsmouth?

Despite the doubts expressed last year, the 38-year-old goalkeeper will be staying on for at least one more campaign.

“It was vital that we kept Brian,” adds Morris. “His experience, his quality, his leadership around the group, they’re all massive [pluses].

“He’s been around a long time, he knows what ‘good’ looks like. We’ve had quite a lot of conversations and thankfully, we managed to get Brian done as quickly as we could. He’s been fantastic in pre-season so far, so hopefully, that transfers into the season starting.”