On Soccer:When Brian Kerr returned to Richmond Park amid some fanfare back in March he suggested a top-five position was as much as St Patrick's Athletic could aspire to in the first season of new owner Garrett Kelleher's reign. After Friday's game in United Park, the remarks seems prescient.

On the face of it, the Dublin-based developer Kerr now works for has enough money to make the club utterly dominant in Ireland, but when he unveiled his new board in June his declared intention went some way beyond that, Kelleher insisting he wished to see St Patrick's become "a force in the European game". It seems an appropriately ambitious target for a man involved in one of the most remarkable property developments in the United States.

Kelleher took over the "Chicago Spire" after its original backers failed to raise the required funding for the scheme.

He subsequently modified the project but the scale remains the same; the building is set to become North America's tallest, at 2,000 feet, and the world's largest apartment block, with some 1,200 highly priced homes included in the plans.

An interesting character who tends to avoid publicity, Kelleher is a former tennis scholarship student in the US and Trinity College dropout who endured some rough times before making it big, first as a painting contractor in Chicago then as a developer. Now in his mid-40s, he is married with a large family and is described as "personable but all business" by one associate.

Having left Chicago in 1995 to become involved in the Dublin property boom, he has been involved with a string of high-profile projects around the city. By May of this year his personal worth was estimated by Deloitte and Touche to be some €750 million.

Still, the numbers involved in the Lake Shore Drive development are daunting even by his standards. The project's basic cost is put at somewhere between €1.2 and €1.5 billion, although given the complicated nature of the building's design, the necessity to dig a very big hole beside a very big lake and the difficulties involved in then going up a third of a mile, it would not be regarded as a huge surprise if the final bill comes in at something higher.

Even at the estimated cost, though, the apartments will have to sell at more than three times current market prices in Chicago and there are those in the city (many of them rivals, Kelleher might claim, with an interest in seeing him fail) who confidently predict he won't be able to pull it off.

Kelleher has a reputation for throwing himself into his biggest projects while delegating the less critical stuff to trusted lieutenants, and with so much at stake in a project scheduled to take three-and-a-half years to complete it has been rumoured he is about to move back to the USA.

In the circumstances then, it was a little surprising that when he unveiled the new board of St Patrick's Athletic he opted to take on the role of chairman himself.

The move did, however, tend to support the claims of those who insist he is personally committed to a club that first came to his attention when he was offered the opportunity to buy its stadium for redevelopment a little over a year ago.

Over the long term he is said to have major plans for Richmond Park but already there are small but welcome signs of his backing around the place.

On the pitch, though, things have not been coming along quite so smoothly of late.

The statistics behind the team's current difficulties are stark. Having won 11 and drawn two of their first 13 games, scoring 31 goals and keeping nine clean sheets along the way, they lost an epic Setanta Cup semi-final against Drogheda late in extra-time and have not, it seems, been the same since. Their last 13 games have yielded 14 goals, four clean sheets and just three victories.

The loss of form has been widely attributed to the injuries sustained first by Joseph Ndo and then by Gary O'Neill, but St Patrick's lost two matches prior to Ndo's knee problem and appeared to have lost their way badly by the time he was sidelined.

No fewer than seven members of John McDonnell's starting 11 have remained fairly constant since the season's start but only a couple have maintained their early-season form.

Rumours abound, meanwhile, regarding the state of the manager's relationship with Kerr, the attitude of Ndo and discontent among other squad members.

The Dubliners were always likely to lose to Odense in the Uefa Cup but the manner and scale of the defeat suffered in the away leg was a major blow to morale.

For a club with such resources the decision to travel to Denmark only a day before the game was bewildering as was the manner of their collapse, the low point coming when Dave Rogers and goalkeeper Barry Ryan squared up to each other after the concession of one of the five goals.

Michael Keane's involvement in the two European games at a time when he was manifestly still unfit was a surprise, as was Alan Kirby's complete absence from the squad for the first game.

Ndo was back on Friday night but his return came at the expense of one of the team's other outstanding performers over the early part of the season, Keith Fahey, who started on the bench.

Fahey did come on in the second half, though, which is more than can be said for Anto Murphy, who paid, it was subsequently rumoured, for a row on the way to the game (small beer by Shamrock Rovers standards, of course).

McDonnell points to the team's current position as being a significant advance on recent seasons and predicts they will continue to move forward together. However, the idea that they would find themselves by the middle of August with, barring a miracle, only a decent run in the cup to aim for would have been unthinkable at the end of April.

Defeat by Bray on Friday night would be the equivalent of flooding in the early stages of laying the Chicago Spire's foundations but even assuming the Inchicore outfit win at the Carlisle Grounds, there is clearly much work to be done before the club scales the heights Kelleher says he's aiming for.