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Emmet Malone on Bray: It was almost an attack on the local community for not supporting the club

The current plight of Bray Wanderers has been the talking point in League of Ireland football ove...



Emmet Malone on Bray: It was a...
Soccer

Emmet Malone on Bray: It was almost an attack on the local community for not supporting the club

The current plight of Bray Wanderers has been the talking point in League of Ireland football over the last week.

The huge investment undertaken in the recent past has seen improvements on the pitch but attendances at the Carlisle Ground remain poor.

The team are currently third in the SSE Airtricity league table but recent events indicate their good form could be coming to an end.

Emmet Malone joined Tuesday's Off the Ball to discuss the current situation.

"We were all pretty taken aback by it in the middle of a game against the league champions," he told Joe Molloy, adding: "It's a big game and they're (Bray) going well in the table at the moment. With hindsight now as we've talked to people since, there were signs that this was all coming down the tubes as such.

"But essentially yeah, all the journalists who were there were surprised - they were surprised by the news that there were really problems there and they were surprised by the way which it was being announced which was not just simply to say that 'there's a difficulty here with wages' but a wider - almost an attack on the local community for not supporting the club in the way that was required to fund the kind of improvements that have gone on, primarily on the pitch.

"They've spent quite heavily by League of Ireland standards this year to really dramatically improve the team.

"And, they've been rewarded for that by a team that's top-three in the league and competing for Europe. You might remember at the start of the season Fran Gavin hailing the kind of investment in Athlone at the time with this suggestion that this was what we could expect now - people would see the League of Ireland as somewhere you could invest your money because there was a potential return from being in Europe and stuff like that but here you have it in Bray, 10 weeks off the end of the season and they're essentially saying 'the money has run out.'" he added.

The full discussion can be heard here: 

Emmet Malone on Bray: It was almost an attack on the local community for not supporting the club

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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