By Gerard Mulreaney (@gerardmulreaney)
Striker Rónán Coughlan has returned to Ireland after three years in England trying to break into the Huddersfield Town first-team, and signed for rookie manager Dave Mackey at Bray Wanderers as he looks to get his career back on track.
Bray lost some players in the off-season, with the likes of Keith Buckley, Ryan Brennan, Peter Cherrie and Luke Rossiter moving on, however the club did manager to hold onto Aaron Greene, Gary McCabe, Hughie Douglas, Ger Pender, Conor Kenna and 2-time club Player of the Year Darragh Noone.
Coughlan was released by Huddersfield in July and had been on the radar of both former club Limerick and Shamrock Rovers, but the striker decided to link up with Bray. He explains how the move came about, “My agent got in touch with Dave Mackey about me and he seemed interested from the start, and he asked me to come in and train with the team and see how I got on. After one or two sessions Dave and I had a chat about the possibility of me signing and how it would work out for both of us. I was happy with the whole set up and was eager to get started so I was very happy to sign. I came in and trained with the lads and really liked the set up so it was an easy decision in the end for me.”
He knows that the club went through a difficult period last season but wasn’t put off, “Yes I had heard about the situation when I was across the water but having spoke to the gaffer and the club everything seems to be sorted now.”
More and more young Irish players are returning from the UK to play in the League of Ireland of late, which shows that the standard of the game here is improving, and Coughlan agrees, “I believe the standard of the league itself is massively under-rated for what ever reason, you can clearly see now that clubs across the water are noticing more and more.”
Bray will be looking to blend a mix of young players with the quality already at the club, “Yes we have a nice mix of youth and experience in the team and hopefully we can have a successful season”, said Coughlan.
The young striker will to be hoping to learn a lot from top quality players like Gary McCabe and Aaron Greene, “yes of course, you can see in training the ability they both have but not just them. There is quality throughout the whole team, but yeah hopefully we can click this season and score some goals.”
On his time at Huddersfield Town Coughlan said, “Moving over when I was 17 and living in digs, playing football every day and improving my game had been my dream since I was a kid. We had a great group of players and achieved many successes at bot U-18 and U-23 level, winning league titles and play-off finals.”
However, that’s all well and good but at the end of the day you need to be playing first team football. In my last year and half or so of my time at Huddersfield I suffered two injuries back to back, first I had tendonitis in my knee and then after coming through that in my first game back I fractured my leg in the opening minutes of the game. I think either way my time at Huddersfield was coming to an end. I was 20 years old and I would have been in need of first team football week in week out, and Huddersfield were flying in the championship at the time and ultimately getting promoted to the Premier League.”
Even though it didn’t work out for him at Huddersfield the young striker hopes that some day he could return to the UK, “Well obviously that’s the ideal scenario to play well here and eventually do good enough to get a move back over but for the time being I’m just fully focused on Bray and the season ahead.”
“First of all I want to establish myself as a regular starter and nail down my position in the team, other than that just to score and assist as much as I can and help the team win games. As a team, we want to achieve as high of a finish as possible of course. I’ve seen some talk about us being predicted to go down but I don’t see that as the case at all, we’ve a great group of coaching staff and lads on the team that are all willing to work hard for one another. I’m really look forward to the season opener against Dundalk and hopefully we can surprise some people this season.”
Picture Credit: Huddersfield Town FC
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