DERRY City boss Tiernan Lynch believes in creating a winning and professional model, which will attract the best players throughout the country to make the Foyleside club their number-one choice.
Like previous City managers, Lynch has found it difficult in the early part of his stewardship to strengthen his squad.
The ex-Larne title-winning gaffer has only been able to add Northern Ireland international Shane Ferguson to his squad so far, but he’s convinced putting things in place and changing the culture at the club will reap rewards in the coming weeks.
“To an extent (it has been difficult bringing players to Derry) and I think there’s a bit of work to be done to break the mould of encouraging players from the South to come up to Derry,” he stated.
“That’s probably something that isn’t going to happen overnight, we’ve got to show them and prove coming to Derry is a great move for them and a good move to hopefully being successful from a footballing perspective and the levels of professionalism that we want to put in place and you also have to do the same thing if you want to try and attract players from Scotland and England.
“Look, the big thing for any player is getting the time to do the due diligence on them and, as I said earlier, there’s players getting offered to us by the bucket load, every single day, but are they going to fit into our culture and how we’re going to play, so there’s a huge amount of work to go into that.”
Lynch’s side started pre-season training last week and he hopes the things he puts in place in the coming weeks and months will benefit the Brandywell outfit in the long-term.
“You can’t plan for a season, you’ve got to try and plan that you’re going to build success over a period of time,” he explained.
“I think if somebody says to any manager, not just me, but if you were told ‘you can win a league title tomorrow, but you’ll not win it again for another 29 years’ or ‘you want to be challenging every single year to try and give you the best chance of challenging for the league’, I think most people would probably say ‘give us a team that’s going to challenge every year’ and I think that’s what we have to be working towards and that’s not a quick fix.
“That’s something where you have to make sure you get the right players in, but at the same time, you certainly aren’t right this season off, but you have to get this season right and give yourself a really good platform to go and springboard from that, so there is an element of a juggling act going on.
“It’s all systems go at the minute. That’s why as a manager you come here to work with top players and get on the grass with top players.
“As a manager that was probably the part that we were looking forward to most. But when you aren’t on the training pitch, you’re on with agents, clubs and players, which is just part and parcel of this time of the year, so we’re working hard to try and get players in.
“There’s no shortcut for it and while it’s not difficult to get players in, it’s probably a bit more difficult to get the right players in.
“We obviously didn’t have a huge amount of time to lead into the window and get proper due diligence done in the positions that we’re after, the players that we’re after so we are fire-fighting a little bit, but listen we’re under no illusions that we’ll get who we want to get hopefully before the first balls kicked.”
