STEPHEN KENNY HAS VOICED his frustration as St Patrick’s Athletic await a decision on their request to have next Sunday’s rescheduled Premier Division match away to Galway United postponed.

St Pat’s face Sabah of Azerbaijan at Tallaght Stadium on Thursday night in the first leg of their UEFA Conference League third round tie.

But with the logistics of the second leg next week in mind, St Pat’s want the Galway game off.

“We have requested the Galway game to be cancelled, because we have to come back from Galway and literally get on a flight in the early hours of the morning to Turkey, and then hang around for a lot of hours and in the end we’ll be on two separate flights,” explained Kenny.

“We have asked Galway and we have asked the FAI. The FAI said you have to make a request to Galway, but Galway have said no, so that’s fair enough, that’s their decision.

“But I think there is a provision in the rulebook for the Director of the League to make a decision.

“My problem is this, you need a bit of vision here. All of the mission statements in the FAI are that we want to have two or three teams in the group stages within a certain amount of years.

“But there is no evidence that it is actually supported.

“We have had games cancelled. We were given a two-week break, we had no match in the first round, so we can’t have a one-size-fits-all in Europe and say, all the European teams have no match.

“So we had to organise friendlies in those weeks because we had no match.

“We then had six matches in a two-week period when I came in before that and now we have five matches in 15 days, including going to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and going through three time-zones to get to Azerbaijan.

“Yet at the moment we haven’t had a positive response. We just have people who want to make sure they don’t upset people.

“Ultimately the FAI board should rule on this. They can’t hide behind it.

“Obviously you have sporting people like Packie Bonner and also Marc Canham as director of football, they should be part of the decision making on this.

“I’m sure if they were, they are probably not aware of any of this, they mightn’t even know who we are playing, but basically they should be aware of this.

“The league should make them aware, they should be part of the decision-making process.

“You can’t have administrators saying, no you have to get on with it, it’s the same for everyone, other leagues do it.

“That’s not it, it’s not about other leagues doing it, it’s about us trying to do it.

“We are trying to get up levels. It’s our fifth game in 15 days, we had to fly to Switzerland, stay in Austria and play in Liechtenstein.

“Now we have to go through three time-zones, go through Turkey, hang around and travel in all hours of the night in the middle of those 15 games.

“The players and staff will be 21 days consecutively without a day off, because they have to recover after games, they have to come in and recover. We want to give them a day off, but they have to recover.

“People go on about player welfare, there is no player welfare. Absolutely zero consideration for player welfare.

“Apart from the team that wins the league, they have a good chance and good luck to them. They deserve it because they are a fantastic squad.

“The route we are going, there is less than a 10 percent chance of achieving it.

“We could get well beaten on Thursday and it might not be an issue. But while we have a chance, we must give ourselves every chance.

“Going to Galway in the middle of the two ties before we fly to Azerbaijan is not giving ourselves a chance.

“The FAI are to make a decision and we will be informed.”