Eircom League: After just six competitive games back at Cork City, Damien Richardson argues it is far too early to assess his performance but the more impatient supporters will be watching carefully on Friday night when a trip to Dalymount Park to face Bohemians should provide the clearest indication yet of how his team is shaping up.

City lost two out of three league meetings with the Dubliners last season but the early indications this year have been generally positive for Richardson, who finds himself having to cope with high expectations back at a club he walked out of a decade ago when they were top of the table.

Cork would, he says, have won the championship in May, 1995, had he not felt obliged to depart midway through the season due to a row over budgets. He may be right but Richardson heads into the new campaign still looking to secure his first title as a manager.

With City having pushed Shelbourne to the last round of games in November thanks to a late run of wins, the only way Richardson can improve things is to guide his side to the top of the table this year. But given his late arrival and Shelbourne's heavy spending he probably has a bit of time to play with.

Any sort of trophy, he says, would make this season look a success and in the circumstances he's right. Beyond that, though, Richardson badly needs to win a league, not just for his club's sake but after the manner of his near success in his last season at Shelbourne, for his own.

He looks to have been given the raw materials required for the task. What he has inherited is a firm base to build on and though there is some sorting out to do over the coming months he looks determined to make the most of an opportunity even he must have started to doubt would come around again.

Pat Dolan assembled a strong squad but it is an enormous one - a major bone of contention between the departed manager and chairman Brian Lennox - and Richardson will be expected to do some serious pruning before he is able to stamp his own impression on the club.

For last year's European games, Dolan took 36 players along, which is about 50 per cent more than the manager of the world's richest club, Chelsea, reckons is healthy to have hanging around the place. After four league and two Setanta Cup games, Richardson concedes he is still some way off being completely familiar with what he has at his disposal.

A Munster Cup game last week helped but he says it will be another month or two before he has weighed everybody's potential, after which it will be getting close to the transfer window when a significant number will be encouraged to seek opportunities elsewhere.

With a core of 16 full-timers Richardson has some quality to work with and, for the first time since his days with Gillingham, they are available to him all of the time. Working on the training ground has always been his professed first love and he has been making up for lost time, bringing his own ideas to the morning sessions with the full-timers back at Bishopstown and returning later to work with the semi-professionals.

For all his options he has shown signs of having settled on his best team with nine players having started the five competitive games played prior to last night's match, a figure matched only by Bray Wanderers, and one which would have been higher had it not been for the injury to John O'Flynn that sidelined him for the past three weeks.

City's success down the years tended to be based on a reputation for tough, uncompromising football and the strength of their home record. It is a little hard to see them producing the former under Richardson but the second, he will know, is a necessity if they are to succeed, and two draws in the two home league games to date is short of the standard.

The defeat of Shelbourne in the Setanta Cup at Turner's Cross showed that the team could match the title favourites in most departments and hammer out a win while away wins at Finn Harps and Longford have also suggested the team possess the character needed to sustain a real challenge over the next seven months.

Friday may prove the toughest test to date but the indications are City don't intend repeating last year's error of turning the title race into a handicap in which they only start to trouble the favourites after the finishing post has come into sight.