The quality of play in the SSE Airtricity Men’s Premier Division is a cause for some concern, according to Alan Cawley.<\/p>\n
While attendances and interest in the League of Ireland have clearly grown in recent years, the former league winner with Shelbourne feels the on-pitch product needs to follow suit.<\/p>\n
Speaking on the RT\u00c9 Soccer Podcast, Cawley, who was at Tolka Park for Friday’s chaotic seven-goal battle between Shels and Drogheda United<\/a>, outlined his misgivings about playing standards this season.<\/p>\n “I’m concerned about the league, the overall standard, where it’s at,” he said as he and Richie Towell reviewed last Friday’s action.<\/p>\n \n Listen to the RT\u00c9 Soccer podcast on Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n “I’ve seen some poor displays, poor games. You look at the teams at the moment, some of them struggling.<\/p>\n “You want games to be of a high standard as well. Of course, there is the interest that’s there, the hype is there.<\/p>\n “But we have to back it up with quality as well in games and you don’t want to get to a situation where there is all the crowd interest, there’s the interest from outside the media interest, the league is on a sound footing, you’re trying to improve it but the quality isn’t there.<\/p>\n “So we need to keep the quality high and if you only have one or two teams that are producing that – and that’s all I see at the moment is one or two producing that – it’s a little bit concerning.”<\/p>\n A lack of technical quality was one factor behind it, he added.<\/p>\n “That’s the reality of it and it disappoints me and I don’t say that in a kind of disrespectful way,” the Sligo native said.<\/p>\n “I’m delighted when Richie said to me the first half (between St Patrick’s Athletic and Bohemians) was absolutely brilliant.<\/p>\n “That’s what you want. Shamrock Rovers against Bohemians last week was a brilliant game of football.<\/p>\n “But you can’t have just one good game every few weeks. We need to see it across the board, some sort of a standard where we’re hitting a good metric every week with three, four or five teams – not just with one game every week.”<\/p>\n Watch Atl\u00e9tico Madrid v Arsenal in the Champions League semi-finals on Wednesday from 7.30pm on RT\u00c92 and RT\u00c9 Player. Follow our live blog on RT\u00c9.ie\/sport and RT\u00c9 News app<\/p>\n Watch Lyon v Arsenal in the UEFA Women’s Champions League semi-finals on Saturday from 1.30pm on RT\u00c92 and RT\u00c9 Player<\/p>\n We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The quality of play in the SSE Airtricity Men’s Premier Division is a cause for some concern, according…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-420949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}