JORDAN FLORES presumably was not who Damien Duff had in mind when he vented about the mid-season break.
The Shelbourne boss hit out at there being no fixtures last week, a situation first introduced when a calendar season was brought in more than two decades ago to allow predominantly part-time players time off in the summer.
Duff said: “There’s an air of the Jolly Boys’ Outing. They are meeting at the pub in the terminal. It’s a week on the gargle.”
It is certainly true that if you wanted to bump into a League of Ireland player the Saturday before last, your best bet was Dublin Airport.
But Flores? He was busy minding his kids, aged eight and two, a reminder that footballers in Ireland are not immune to the reality of needing both parents working.
If doing Daddy Daycare is more demanding than any training session, Flores is optimistic that the pause will not halt Bohs’ momentum.
Alan Reynolds’ side — who travel to strugglers Cork City tonight — collected 21 points from the second series of league games, compared to only nine from the first.
Flores said: “I’m not concerned. It’s good for lads to have a rest.
“We have been back in since Saturday and the lads have looked good in training. We have had a few hard days.”
Englishman Flores has experienced a lot since coming to Ireland in 2019, initially joining Dundalk with whom he won a league title, FAI Cup and played in the group stage of the Europa League.
And he famously scored a Puskas Award-nominated hip-high volley against Shamrock Rovers.
But silverware has eluded him since signing for Bohs in 2022, after a year back in England with Hull City and Northampton Town.
Goals have become harder to come by since being reinvented as a left-back, although he has won his fair share of headers at set-pieces.
Flores, 29, sighed: “I’d take a tap-in at the far post at this stage. Yeah, it’s become a bit of a talking point amongst the lads.
“Even though I’m in defence, I’ve had quite a few chances.
“We work a lot on set-pieces and I feel we do carry a threat between myself, Rob Cornwall, Seán Grehan and Leigh Kavanagh.”
This will be Grehan’s penultimate game for Bohs before he returns to Crystal Palace at the end of his impressive loan spell.
The Ireland Under-21 international has been one of the Gypsies’ star performers but team-mate Flores is confident that Kavanagh’s return to fitness will help minimise the impact of his loss.
The former Wigan Athletic man said: “Seán is a great player. You can see he is going to have a good career.
“But everyone has the same belief in Leigh as they do in Seán.”
POSITIONAL CHANGE
Although the attacking threat of a centre-half is usually only seen in dead-ball situations, Grehan has regularly popped up in the right attacking channel.
And Flores admitted that the fluidity of Bohs’ shape has added another layer of complexity to adapting to a positional change, but that the rewards for gaffer Reynolds’ approach are now being reaped.
He said: “I feel I’m starting to get to grips with it. It’s not just as simple as he wants me to be a left-back.
“There are different variations from one game to the next. I found it difficult last season but I think I’m putting in more consistent performances now.”
That could be said of the team as a whole with Flores believing they have managed to convert decent displays into positive results and are benefitting from having a settled group after a high turnover of both players and managers.
He added: “Even when results weren’t going our way at the start of the season we weren’t too downbeat.
“The conversations we were having were in contrast to last year when it was doom and gloom.
“We felt we were playing well but a bit inconsistent and then it clicked. We did feel we wanted to mix it up a bit more and we’ve done that.
“We wanted to try to put teams on the back foot and shore it up at the back and we’ve done that. Our aims haven’t changed from the start of the season.
“At the very least you want to achieve European qualification but, in a ten-team league, you’d be silly not to target challenging for the title.”
