Dundalk in Europe

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Interview with Alan Keane, the man who has come out of retirement to play European football for Dundalk.

Dundalk’s European adventure continues on Thursday as the Irish champions play their first Europa League group game away to AZ in Alkmaar. It’s the next step on an amazing journey for the part-timers. A club whose very existence was threatened only four years ago.

Much has changed since Monaghan United withdrew from competition, thus allowing Dundalk to contest and win a play-off against Waterford to stay in the top flight. With new owners and the debts paid off, the turnaround has been as emphatic as it’s been swift.

Manager Stephen Kenny, who got the job in 2013 a year after being axed by Shamrock Rovers, has masterminded much of it. A come-from-behind win over Champions League regulars BATE Borisov even took Dundalk to the brink of Europe’s biggest tournament.

Legia Warsaw proved too tricky to overcome but the Europa League is some second prize. They are only the second Irish side to get this far and as well as the opener at AZ, they’re rewarded with ties against Zenit St Petersburg and Maccabi Tel Aviv.

Kenny has achieved it all with a team made up of architects and electricians. A team that has to train during the evenings in order to accommodate those players who have day jobs. Not that they’ve been training too much lately.

Aiming to win the double for a second successive season, Dundalk won an FAI Cup quarter-final against University College Dublin in front of 506 people on Friday and squeezed in another league game against Finn Harps on Monday, winning 2-0, before heading out to Holland.

Should Dundalk reach the FAI Cup final, they’ll be playing less than 72 hours before the trip to St Petersburg. It’s a fixture list that has necessitated more numbers. A fixture list that’s caused Alan Keane to put an end to playing Gaelic football and come out of retirement.

A versatile player capable of filling in anywhere across the back line, Keane had been a mainstay of the Sligo Rovers side for over six years, winning the title in 2012. But at the age of 31, he’d been retired for six months and even switched sports when Kenny …

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