Stephen Henderson explains why he left Cobh Ramblers
Stephen Henderson says the disrespect shown towards his former players at Cobh Ramblers was a factor in him leaving the club.
Henderson spent more than eight years as Cobh manager across two terms, leading them into the Premier Division in 2007 and to the EA Sports Cup final in 2018.
However, he said the lingering resentment towards the players over Cobh's financial troubles in the past decade infuriated him.
"At my last meeting before I left, there was still one fella there who said, 'We all know those players broke this club'. One fella still said that," he told podcast.
I was fuming, genuinely fuming, and I started to have a go off of him. That's when I probably knew it was time to get out.
"When he said that, I could feel the veins going and I'd enough of people like him talking that complete and utter nonsense. And this fella knows the intricacies of the club.
"To come out and say something like that, I was fuming and I wanted to have a go and I had to calm down a bit after it, but that was the kind of nonsense, the ignorance, that you had to contend with.
"The players were always Cobh Ramblers. They were absolutely phenomenal. They gave everything for that football club for little or no return, and that's the truth.
"They'd train five days a week for you if you asked them and they'd go through a brick wall for that football club and for that jersey, and they represented that club unbelievably.
"That they have insults like that thrown at them, it drove me fucking mad. The players gave that club the profile it has now. It's taken them onto another level what they did in 2007."
Following their relegation in 2008, Cobh's financial struggles saw them fail to obtain a licence for the First Division, forcing them into the 'A' Championship, then Ireland's third tier of football.
"The club had built a brand-new stand, there was brand-new state-of-the-art floodlights, and a brand-new dressing room complex was built, and the club got itself into a huge financial mess.
"You could hear people blaming it on the players, the players were breaking the club, and that just wasn't the case. They weren't on huge money by any stretch of the imagination. It was just how the club itself was mismanaged.
"This all came because the FAI demanded standards to play in their new league. You had to have a certain amount of seats, you had to have these floodlights for the cameras, and they were forcing clubs into doing stuff and spending money they didn't have.
"Cobh paid for that. You wouldn't even blame Cobh for it, you'd just blame the amount of pressure that was getting applied on them to have these standards and they felt that they had to do it.
"The club still hasn't recovered from it."
Now head of youth development at Shelbourne, Henderson added: "That's why there's something like 20-odd clubs went out of business, because of these demands that were put on them when they didn't have the money to do it."
