Sin É?

Sometimes the Red Star becomes the Green Star for a day (a natural consequence of where I was born). The first one looks at how history repeated itself for the Irish team against Denmark.

On Wednesday 18th November 2009, the Republic of Ireland senior men’s football team arrived in Paris for the second-leg of a World Cup qualifying playoff against France. They proceeded, against every conceivable expectation, to produce arguably the greatest performance in the team’s then 85 (now 95) year history.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. First, a little background to the game.

Ireland trailed 0-1 on aggregate from the first-leg in Dublin four days earlier, a Nicolas Anelka strike separating the two sides after the kind of dour, conservative Irish performance that had become the norm under Italian coach Giovanni Trapattoni. The last word on the RTÉ website’s match-tracker for the evening sums it up well, via the medium of former Irish international and TV pundit Eamon Dunphy, as well as by noting the absence of a couple of Ireland’s more creative players, the first of them omitted from the squad by choice despite having run the game for Sunderland in a 2-2 draw at Old Trafford a few weeks earlier:

10.02 p.m. Pundit-watch. Dunphy comes to the boil and reiterates his views on the Ireland manager’s tactics. It’s hard to argue with his assertion that such non-expansive play is destined to aim in failure in the long-run. Wonder what Andy Reid and Stephen Ireland were doing tonight?

http://rte.ie/amp/257369

In qualifying for the playoff with France, Ireland had finished second in UEFA Group 8 behind what would subsequently become the first Italian side in 36 years to exit at the group stage of a World Cup (the manager nonetheless compared the April 2009 away fixture in Bari to “David and Goliath”). Ireland ultimately managed a couple of draws against them, 1-1 and 2-2, results that lowly New Zealand would subsequently match in the tournament proper.

Of their main competition for second spot, Bulgaria, Trapattoni said after drawing 1-1 in Sofia that “I always thought that this was going to be a more difficult game for us than Italy away because Bulgaria are a very dangerous team…I am happy now with the good result”. Bear in mind, he had called Ireland’s visit to Bari “David and Goliath”, so we can only assume that he saw Bulgaria as some kind of super-Goliath. The Bulgarians would come from behind to draw 1-1 against his side home and away but, for context, would lose 1-4 to Cyprus during this campaign. Make of that what you will.

Trapattoni’s approach of getting ahead and then dropping back to defend the lead was undone time and time again over the campaign: 1-0 and 2-1 became 2-2 against the Italians at home, 1-0 became 1-1 against Bulgaria twice, and Ireland narrowly avoided a similar fate against a depleted Cyprus in Dublin, eventually holding on to win 1-0. A scoreless draw in Montenegro, meanwhile, was defended with gusto, as the manager recalled afterwards: “the players understood what I said to them — that it was possible to lose and they should run down the clock if they could.” Again, for context, it should be noted that Montenegro won 1 out of 10 in this group.

The consequences of this approach saw Ireland lose 6 points from winning positions (vs. Bulgaria and Italy), and they willingly lost another 2 in Podgorica because “it was possible to lose”. Had those draws been turned into victories, Ireland would have topped the group by 3 points from the Italians and never would have had to face the French at all.

It would take the manager another three and a half years to explicitly spell out the underlying justification for this methodology, after a cowardly second-half performance at home to Austria in March 2013 saw his side pegged back to 2-2 at the death, a result which took qualification for yet another World Cup out of Irish hands: “We are Ireland. Do you think we are Germany or England?” Beating Bulgaria even once (lost 1-4 in Cyprus), beating Montenegro even once (1 win out of 10), emulating what Slovakia would subsequently do in South Africa by beating Italy even once (drew 1-1 with New Zealand at the World Cup and were beaten by a team that would be losing 0-4 at home to Armenia within 15 months) were clearly tasks more befitting of the Germans or the English. This group of Irish players simply wasn’t up to tackling such onerous challenges.

This wasn’t just Trapattoni’s belief either: the aforementioned view expressed by Dunphy following the disappointing first-leg defeat against the French was very much the minority one. A Guardian article in the aftermath of the second-leg was broadly representative of the popular opinion at the time, making the case that “in 18 months and from limited resources Trapattoni has sculpted a team who are hard-working, disciplined and never-say-die” and that the “performance to etch into the folklore of the nation” that had just taken place in Paris was “one, yet again, to remind everybody of his managerial genius”.

The article went on to mention that three-quarters of Ireland’s starting midfield that night were “players who, until recently, were viewed as journeymen” and who “have played in all four divisions of the English game and their spells in League Two were no fleeting encounters”. Indeed, while France could call upon a team of Champions League veterans from European mainstays like Barcelona, Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Lyon to secure their passage to South Africa, the clubs represented by the Irish first-XI and substitutes in Paris included the likes of Blackburn Rovers, Hull City, Preston North End, Stoke City, Sunderland and Wolverhampton Wanderers, far from the bright lights of Europe’s richest club competition.

So how did they do it? How did these “journeymen” players like Keith Andrews, Glenn Whelan, Liam Lawrence, Kevin Kilbane and Sean St. Ledger not only beat their technically-superior opponents 1-0 across 90 minutes in front of over 70,000 French fans inside the Stade de France, but also dominate the game to such an extent that better finishing could have seen them 3-0 up and coasting to South Africa before the end of normal time?

How, at the most vital moment of the campaign, of their careers in some cases, could these lads produce a performance so unexpected when set against not only the previous 18 months of Trapattoni’s management, but against the previous nine years going back as far as the last Irish away performance of such ambition and quality against a top international opponent, a 2-2 World Cup qualifying draw in Amsterdam in September 2000? How did they produce a performance that was, arguably, as good as anything seen from a senior Irish team since the Soviet Union in Hanover during Euro ’88? Was it really down to Trapattoni’s “managerial genius” in conjuring miracles from such “limited resources”. Or was it something else?

One of those “journeymen”, Keith Andrews, would tell the tale some seven years later:

It was very restrictive. Glenn Whelan still gets stick now which is absolutely ridiculous. Every week you check teamsheets — whatever game I’m working, you’d obviously have one eye on the Irish lads. Every single week, for how many years, he’s been in the Stoke team. Good player. But the thing that fans don’t realise, is that certain people in the squad were pushed to one side because they wouldn’t buy into what the manager wanted you to do.

So, on those one-off games, when we’re either a little bit desperate — in Paris where we know we have to come back from a goal down. Or Estonia, where we kind of feel, ‘This is our opportunity’, in the main you can’t be going and doing your own thing to a degree, in our ‘philosophy’ shall we say under Trapattoni.

[But] I think the players took it upon themselves, realising the situation and the scenario we were in. We had really good leaders in that team. I loved walking out of the tunnel next to Shay, Richard Dunne — I felt like a gladiator walking next to him [Dunne]. When he put on that jersey he was like a man mountain. Robbie, Duffer obviously, I loved playing with. I just felt we had those leaders within the group. We always seemed to play better when we played together.

When Andrews talks about “leaders”, he name-checks Richard Dunne, Robbie Keane and Damien Duff, three jewels in the crown of a golden-generation of young Irish talent that remains largely unheralded outside of Ireland. This was a generation of players that came up under Brian Kerr and also included the likes of John O’Shea, Stephen McPhail, Andy Reid, Liam Miller and Gary Doherty, amongst others. Ireland would finish third at the World Youth Championship in 1997, beaten only by an Argentina side that included Juan Román Riquelme, Walter Samuel, Esteban Cambiasso and Pablo Aimar, and win European Championships at under-16 and under-18 level in 1998. That period of success would ultimately yield a glut of Premier League-calibre players, the country’s record international goalscorer, and a couple of defensive lynchpins that would anchor the senior team for well over a decade.

These were players that deserved better than to be told that their talent wasn’t sufficient to compete with the likes of Italy, Bulgaria and Montenegro in the 2010 World Cup qualifiers, that their only hope of success lay in the safety of a defensive straitjacket that minimised risk and inspiration alike. Far from getting the best from his resources, Trapattoni set them a ceiling so low that they banged their heads repeatedly against it. In Paris, with their World Cup dreams slipping away, they smashed through it for one night only and gave the French a footballing lesson by consciously ignoring their manager and playing football. But it was too late by then.

Despite winning 1-0 over 90 minutes, the Irish players weren’t clinical enough when the chances arrived on the night. The game went to extra-time, and while France were subsequently able to call upon seasoned campaigners like Sevilla’s Sébastien Squillachi, Lyon’s Sidney Govou and Chelsea’s Florent Malouda off the bench, a tiring Irish side depended on Paul McShane, Darron Gibson and Aiden McGeady to bolster their ranks.

Ireland had already wilted by the time Thierry Henry forever etched his name into the annals of history as the villain of Ireland’s ill-fated attempts to qualify for South Africa via his ultimate act of ruthless professionalism (or grand larceny, if you prefer) in the 103rd minute, controlling the ball twice with his hand before squaring for William Gallas to nod home the crucial equaliser that put the French 2-1 ahead on aggregate. And yet Henry’s handball(s) was always — and I mean right from the seconds immediately after Martin Hansson’s whistle blew to end the game — a symptom of a more fundamental failure closer to home, one that had nothing to do with a poorly-defended set-piece or the “limited resources” at Trapattoni’s disposal. This was a failure of ambition, a glorious opportunity to go to a World Cup thrown away at the altar of denigrating a group of Irish players much better than their manager ever believed.

So they fell short in Paris, but in reality the ship had been taking on water throughout the campaign: in Dublin, in Sofia, in Podgorica, with every dropped point that brought us closer to France and a game that required everything to go right in order to prevail against a superior team — perfect defending, perfect finishing, perfect refereeing. As we know, everything seldom goes right in a game of football, and that night was no exception. But those lads sure came awfully close. The shame is that they didn’t back themselves sooner.

* * *

It feels as though we’ve been hearing the term “limited resources” thrown around in relation to Ireland teams forever, but it has seldom been explained what that actually means. Trapattoni clearly had his own extreme interpretation, namely that Irish players are so fundamentally inferior to their German, English and Italian counterparts that any criticism for points dropped against average sides like Bulgaria and Montenegro (2008/09), Slovakia (2010/11) or Austria (2013) is both futile and unwarranted.

And yet his successor Martin O’Neill, by no means averse to pleading poverty himself at times, would engineer victories over three of those nations with arguably fewer playing resources than the Italian had at his disposal, including a 1-0 victory over reigning world champions Germany in October 2015 that stands in stark contrast to the 1-6 destruction overseen by Trapattoni three years earlier. That’s the thing about “limited resources”: they become ever more limited while we’re complaining about them.

For most people, however, the term is defined by the memory of what we had. When Jack Charlton took over the team back in 1986, for example, it boasted multiple players drawn from the cream of British club football: Mark Lawrenson, Ronnie Whelan and Jim Beglin at Liverpool (John Aldridge and Ray Houghton would also move to Anfield shortly thereafter), Paul McGrath, Kevin Moran and Frank Stapleton at Manchester United, David O’Leary and Niall Quinn at Arsenal, Chris Hughton and Tony Galvin at Tottenham Hotspur, and Pat Bonnar at Glasgow Celtic back when the Scottish League was of a far higher standard than it is today (Chris Morris and Mick McCarthy would also join him in subsequent years). Ireland still had Liam Brady too, veteran of the world’s toughest league with Juventus and Inter.

The subsequent managerial reigns of Mick McCarthy (1996—2002) and Brian Kerr (2003—2005) also included plenty of players from similarly successful clubs. Jason McAteer, Steve Staunton and Steve Finnan all represented Liverpool, with the latter winning a Champions League medal in 2005. Roy Keane, Denis Irwin and John O’Shea won multiple trophies at home and abroad with Manchester United. The well-travelled Robbie Keane represented major clubs like Inter, Leeds United and Tottenham Hotspur. Damien Duff won Premier League titles with Chelsea and saw plenty of European action. Gary Kelly and Ian Harte reached a Champions League semi-final with Leeds United.

Over time, however, football has gradually globalised. Young Irish lads going across to England are now sharing youth academies with players from all over the world, including many from traditional super-powers like France and Spain, and the attributes required from them by largely foreign managers and coaches (certainly in the Premier League) means that those who do make it across the Irish Sea are often having to drop down the divisions to get their opportunity. It’s probably no surprise that Irish players playing their trade at the top level in England tend to be picked up by British managers (e.g. Sean Dyche at Burnley has had Jeff Hendrick, Robbie Brady, Jon Walters and Stephen Ward in recent years, and Chris Wilder at Sheffield United currently has David McGoldrick, John Egan, Enda Stevens and Callum Robinson) who still prioritise some of the more traditional Irish traits.

This trend has had a sizeable effect on the Republic of Ireland national team. As recently as June 2019, the fourteen players that drew 1-1 in Copenhagen thanks to a late Shane Duffy header included only four from Premier League clubs (Duffy, Seamus Coleman, Hendrick and Brady), although the promotions of Sheffield United and Aston Villa have since more than doubled that number. Meanwhile, the last Irish international to play Champions League football was Cillian Sheridan for APOEL in 2014. The number of players performing at the highest level, as well as the stature of their respective club teams, is the most straightforward measure of “resources”. Not only does playing for a big club provide a rough indication of a player’s worth in the wider sense, it also exposes him to better coaching, bigger pressures and more nuanced tactical planning, all of which can then become useful tools for his international side.

With all of that in mind, nobody would ever make the argument that the Irish team is currently on a par resource-wise with where it was thirty, or even fifteen, years ago. That simply isn’t the case. Nor was it ever part of the remit for “big-name”, highly-paid managers like Trapattoni, O’Neill or McCarthy to solve that. Their job was to guide Ireland to major tournaments with the senior players at their disposal, not put structures in place that would eventually address the dearth of Irish players in the game’s upper-echelons.

At the same time, there are examples in recent history of similarly limited international teams punching above their weight to a far greater extent than Ireland have managed. Our neighbours to the north are the obvious one. Michael O’Neill has achieved as much with Northern Ireland in the last three qualifying campaigns as the Republic have within the same timeframe (i.e. qualification and last-16 in Euro 2016, playoff loss for Russia 2018, and playoffs for Euro 2020). He has done so with arguably fewer resources than Martin O’Neill and Mick McCarthy (e.g. the rancour over Shane Duffy alone indicates that the Derry man would walk straight into their team), and most certainly with a smaller salary.

Furthermore, while his counterpart south of the border was explicitly suggesting during this qualification campaign that his team was inferior to group rivals Denmark and Switzerland (“To get first or second was always going to be an overachievement when you look at the two teams”) and even intimating parity with Georgia (“Georgia are a very good side, excellent…if you had offered me four points from the two games against Georgia before we started, I would have taken it”), O’Neill’s side tackled a far more difficult group containing Germany and the Netherlands, and they managed to give a talented Dutch side the scare of their lives, leading 1-0 in Rotterdam with ten minutes to go and only bowing out of contention for automatic qualification with a 0-0 draw against them in Belfast.

Other relatively recent examples include:

• Costa Rica, who knocked England and Italy out of the 2014 World Cup and only succumbed to the Netherlands in the quarter-final on penalties, with a squad comprised mainly of players based in Costa Rica, MLS and Scandinavia, hardly the pinnacle of the sport;
• Chile, who knocked out perhaps the greatest international side of all-time, Spain, in the same tournament with a couple of English Championship players (Cardiff City’s Gary Medel and Nottingham Forest’s Gonzalo Jara) anchoring the defence, although the presence of Arturo Vidal and Alexis Sánchez at the other end no doubt helped;
• Iceland, who qualified ahead of the Netherlands for Euro 2016, finished ahead of eventual champions Portugal in the group stage, and knocked out England in the last-16;
• Wales, who, Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey aside, were desperately short on star-power next to the Belgian side they dispatched 3-1 in the Euro 2016 quarter-final: their starting centre-forward, Hal Robson-Kanu, didn’t even have a club at the time!

Go back further, and you have the rather extreme example of Greece in Euro 2004. “Extreme” in that they won the tournament, which nobody in their right mind would expect of the current Irish team. Nonetheless, they did so with a squad full of unheralded players and a dour tactical approach that yielded only 7 goals in 6 games but also three consecutive clean-sheets against the might of reigning champions France, the Czech Republic and hosts Portugal in the knockout stages.

Otto Rehhagel’s men, and for that matter Jack Charlton’s Italia ’90 quarter-finalists, also stand as monuments to the universal truth that effective football will almost always trump beautiful football in the eyes of supporters, especially where national teams are concerned. The aforementioned Eamon Dunphy’s valid criticism of Ireland’s tactics during the scoreless draw with Egypt in June 1990 largely fell on deaf ears amongst the Irish public, even as they were scoring 2 goals in 5 games, both defensive errors, which hardly endeared Charlton’s side to neutral viewers. Similarly, the Greeks’ defensive, physical style in Portugal may have earned them a trophy but it won them few admirers outside of their homeland. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands packed the streets of Dublin and Athens to welcome their teams home.

Do Ireland have “limited resources” compared to the best international sides? Of course they do, but please, let’s compare apples with apples. Nations like Northern Ireland, Costa Rica, Chile, Iceland, Wales and Greece are the correct comparisons, not Germany or England. Trapattoni’s remark that “We are Ireland. Do you think we are Germany or England?” was lunacy, and should have been treated with contempt from the moment the words left his mouth. It followed criticism of a 2-2 home draw against a nation (Austria) that had already drawn 0-0 in Kazakhstan during the same qualifying campaign, and whose only away wins going back over 7 years had come in Azerbaijan (2011) and Liechtenstein (2006). Yet the implication was that Ireland needed to have players comparable to their German and English counterparts in order to beat them!

Legitimate “limited resources” are one thing; self-preservatory spin is quite another. Ask yourself: have the various limitations of the Irish squads over the past decade been treated as a mere obstacle to overcome on the road to success, or as a self-fulfilling justification for failure? A manager can arrive and immediately realise that tiki-taka or expansive attacking football is beyond the abilities possessed by his players, yet still achieve big results with any number of tactical approaches, attractive or otherwise. The danger is the manager who arrives with pre-determined outcomes already in his mind. That’s when you find the opportunities passing by with nary an attempt to reach out a hand to grab them lest, God forbid, you trip and fall in the process.

What was it Trapattoni said after the 0-0 draw with Montenegro back in 2008? It was possible to lose? Well, indeed: what a fitting epitaph for the Italian’s reign. Mick McCarthy’s version of the same mantra, at least in his second incarnation, has been “I would have taken it”. Different managers, but the same message and (so far) result.

* * *

On Monday 18th November 2019 — as fate would have it, ten years to the day since their predecessors’ glorious failure in the French capital — the Republic of Ireland senior men’s football team arrived in Dublin for the final group game of the Euro 2020 qualifiers. Once again, only a win would do; once again, they faced a technically-superior opponent, amply demonstrated by Denmark’s 5-1 victory in the same ground in similar circumstances two years earlier; and once again, they arrived into it on the back of a qualifying campaign defined to a large extent by negativity and wasted opportunities.

The aftermath was very similar too, from the final result (1-1) to the level of surprise expressed at the performance. Ex-Irish internationals seemed to be queuing up to gush: Ronnie Whelan called it Ireland’s best performance in the group, Liam Brady “the best we’ve played in years” (since Paris, perhaps?) and Richie Sadlier the “type of football at times that we haven’t seen from Ireland before” which should see the team entering the playoffs with “confidence rather than optimism”.

There were some differences too, of course, primarily that Ireland have not been eliminated from contention by their failure to win this time. Instead, they live to fight another day next March against Slovakia, before hopefully progressing to a final qualification game in either Belfast or Zenica. That has, at the very least, spared us an immediate aftermath like 2009, when even the Taoiseach and Minister for Justice took time away from overseeing the financial disaster unfolding on their watch to demand a replay from FIFA. There’s still time for all that in the spring, I suppose, but at least there’s something positive to look forward to in the meantime.

The other major difference is that the football which so excited the RTÉ pundits against Denmark took place inside a concentrated 15-minute spell at the end of the game rather than across the full 90 minutes of normal-time, as had been the case in Paris. This was no real surprise, given what had come before in the qualification campaign, but it was an interesting insight into what might have happened in 2009 had the senior players not decided to take matters into their own hands.

Instead, more or less the same plan that yielded a point in Copenhagen last June was dusted off and utilised once again, despite the necessity of a win this time. Ireland looked to be trying to keep the game scoreless until around the 75th minute, perhaps hoping that by then the Danes might have settled for the point that would secure their qualification (they mostly had, incidentally). That would have left the home side needing just a single goal in the last 15 minutes to send them through to next summer’s tournament on a scoreline of 1-0. At that point, the plan would no doubt be to summon all 6’4” of Derry’s Shane Duffy from his central defensive post and launch an aerial bombardment on the Danish penalty area, as they had in the away game.

The only snag with the plan, as outlined, was that victory was a must. Oh, and Denmark had already scored through Martin Braithwaite in the 73rd minute. Oops.

Only when the Danes scored did Ireland start to play the kind of football that Whelan, Brady and Sadlier praised in the aftermath, aided no doubt by the visitors retreating to protect what they had. The influence of the full-backs, Wolves’ Matt Doherty and Sheffield United’s Enda Stevens, was especially notable, and the latter duly crossed for the former to equalise on 85 minutes. Ireland’s approach play during this period was more sophisticated than many of us had expected, and while Duffy did indeed move upfront towards the end, his team largely eschewed long punts in favour of working their way around the back of the Danish defence, to good effect. Had proceedings continued for another 10 minutes, the home side would have almost certainly fashioned a winner.

If only games and, indeed, entire qualification campaigns lasted a mere 15 minutes, then one might have been inclined to agree with the RTÉ panel. Alas, they don’t: just like South Africa 2010, this more attacking approach arrived far too late in the day to be of real consequence. Denmark could have won 5-1 again and the outcome would have remained a playoff with Slovakia. The only result that mattered on the night was victory, and Ireland paced themselves so brilliantly for it that they ran out of time in the end.

Somehow, the squandered opportunity represented by the adoption of such a conservative approach to a must-win game escaped the collective attention of Whelan, Brady and Sadlier, who preferred instead to focus on those 15 futile minutes of ambitious football when there was no other option remaining and the Danes had long since abandoned any pretence of attacking their opponents, instead packing their penalty area for the expected bombardment of long balls towards Duffy. There were also the obligatory caveats thrown in that the manager “can only work with the players that are there” (Sadlier), and former Germany international Didi Hamann elaborated on that point somewhat by saying “the worst thing they could do now is to say ‘Well, actually, we’re better than people think…’ ”

In other words, stay in your lane, because God forbid we see an Irish team display anything other than crippling anxiety against a nation a mere two places above them in the FIFA rankings (Slovakia). Regardless of the Danish approach towards the end of the game, had the Irish team not just demonstrated that they’re better than people think i.e. able to pass the ball, work themselves into dangerous positions, create openings, be patient, be ambitious, all that good stuff? The obvious counterpoint to Hamann’s argument is that playing more like they did in the last 15 minutes against Denmark throughout the qualification campaign might have led to a better outcome in the end.

Instead, Ireland’s safety-first approach, for the majority of this game and the entirety of the other seven, ultimately left a team that averaged less than a goal per game in Group D and struggles to get shots on target at the best of times with 15 minutes to score twice against an opponent that hasn’t lost over 90 minutes in more than three years (34 games). McCarthy said beforehand that “we’d have all took it” if such a scenario was offered last December. Yet this very attitude had guided his team towards one of the most difficult challenges they could have faced in a final game, in much the same way that dropped points across the campaign back in 2008/09, particularly against Bulgaria and Montenegro, left Ireland facing the daunting challenge of France in the playoffs.

What were the alternatives, though, given the “limited resources” at McCarthy’s disposal? Well, let’s consider Ireland’s final three group games of the qualifiers as a representative sample of what was possible: a 0-0 draw in Tblisi, a 0-2 defeat in Geneva, and a 1-1 draw at home to the Danes.

The first of those left Ireland requiring a single win from their final two games to qualify automatically, a decent scenario on the face of it for a team with “limited resources”. The manager was certainly happy with it, incredulously responding to criticism before the game in Geneva a few days later that “everybody would have taken the position we’re in now, going to Switzerland and if we win, we qualify; if we beat Denmark, we qualify.” And yet the difficulty of the task at hand was writ large across his earlier statement that “To get first or second was always going to be an overachievement when you look at the two teams” (i.e. Denmark and Switzerland).

He would also say the following of the Switzerland game: “If we end up with a draw, I’ll take it and I’ll be happy with it”, presumably because he considers Switzerland “a very good side”. In reality, a draw in Geneva would have meant absolutely nothing in the context of the group, nothing. However, it would have meant something had Ireland won in Tblisi: draws in Ireland’s last two games against the Swiss and Danes would have secured qualification in that scenario. McCarthy was unaware of that, I guess, saying after the Georgia result that “I’m not going away disappointed with a point”. Yet that result in Tblisi effectively left his team needing to win against a better side.

In a broad sense, perhaps it was true to say that “everybody would have taken the position we’re in now” at the start of the tournament, but that ignores the organic situational context of a qualification campaign. What if you had given “everybody” a choice between: (a) beating Georgia and having to get draws off Switzerland and Denmark (a result that Ireland had already achieved against both), or (b) drawing in Georgia and having to beat one of those sides? What would “everybody” say then? And what does your attitude in December 2018 have to do with the realities facing you in October 2019 anyway, with Denmark’s dropped points in Tblisi the previous month having presented Ireland with such an unexpected opportunity?

There is a school of thought, I’m sure, that the manager was simply trying to maintain an air of positivity around his side’s chances of qualifying after the draw in Georgia, but that position would ignore the inherently negative manner in which he put his point across. Anyone critical of the performance were “peddlers of doom and gloom”, it was “a ridiculous notion” to suggest that a scoreless draw was a disappointing result, and one press-conference question was answered with a contemptuous “Have you ever played at senior professional level? Obviously not.”

He also sought to shift any sense of blame for Ireland’s struggles in October and November from himself to his players a little too often for my liking: “See, I find that slightly ridiculous that I didn’t ask them to play better with the ball” (post-Georgia), “I’m not accepting responsibility for our inability to pass it to each other in the first half because we were really poor” (post-Switzerland), and he admitted being so busy “giving out” to Doherty for his defensive lapse in the final game that “I forgot to congratulate him on his goal” (post-Denmark).

The Wolves man, of course, plays in a far different system under Nuno Espírito Santo at club level (three centre-backs, for a start) and has long been behind Seamus Coleman in the pecking order for Ireland. His most recent outing before Denmark saw him play down the left against Georgia, so it’s not as if he’s had a long bedding-in period in his specialist position with this Irish team. He was also, arguably, Ireland’s best player against the Danes. It’s a real shame that his manager couldn’t concentrate, publicly at least, on the many positive contributions he had made on the night, especially with Doherty using words like “sickening” and “upset” to describe his mood after the game. But I suppose it was important for people to know that the plan had been working (well, the first part of it anyway) until a player messed it up.

McCarthy’s assertion that “if you had offered me four points from the two games against Georgia before we started, I would have taken it” was his “We are Ireland. Do you think we are Germany or England?” moment, the point at which he took self-preservation beyond the point of believability.

I mean, I know the FIFA rankings are considered by many to be a deeply flawed metric by which to judge the quality of a side, and they are; but however the system works, given that this Irish team currently sits 34th in the world, I can only imagine the level of ineptitude required to plumb the depths of 91st, below a country literally being torn apart by civil war (Syria in 79th) and another that has only been competing since 2011 (Curaçao in 80th). Have the Georgians simply not been turning up for games? And the manager himself acknowledged that even the locals were thinking like this (“I get the feeling, even from the Georgian journalists, that we should be disappointed“).

I’ll tell you what “everybody would have taken” at the start of the qualifiers, right? Maximum points from Georgia (currently 91st in the world, 2 shots on target in 270 minutes at home to Denmark, Ireland and Switzerland, recently seen requiring a late winner to beat Gibraltar’s part-timers 3-2) and Gibraltar (currently 196th in the world, 4 wins out of 46 in their history). Ireland eventually finished on 13 points: four wins over the weakest teams in the group would have given them 12 of those alone. In ten games, McCarthy’s only wins during his second tenure in charge have come against Bulgaria, Georgia, Gibraltar and New Zealand, two of which were friendlies and all of whom sit well below his side in the world rankings (Bulgaria are the highest at 59th). Where is the value being added by a manager whose only job was to qualify for the European Championship?

Given that qualification was the sole objective at the start of this campaign — then-CEO of the FAI, John Delaney, stated during the manager’s unveiling last year that “qualifying for Euro 2020 is hugely important considering we are hosting four games at the Aviva Stadium” — how could finishing above Denmark or Switzerland be considered in any way “an overachievement”? That strikes me more as an achievement, something to be proud of, an accomplishment of a goal that was presumably written into the manager’s contract. Furthermore, the associated implication is that merely finishing above Georgia and Gibraltar is somehow to be considered a regular-sized achievement, meaning that the binary outcomes of Group D for this team was either vastly exceeding or grossly falling short of expectations, in which case no mere achievement was ever possible at all in this campaign?

You could be kind to Mick McCarthy here and dispute whether he truly would have taken four points from Georgia, if offered, at the outset of this campaign. But the alternative is that he’s chatting intelligence-insulting bollocks, and both of those possibilities are self-incriminatory when you think about it.

To his credit, the manager immediately called up 19 year-old Aaron Connolly from the Under-21 team mere days after he had his coming-out party for Brighton and Hove Albion, scoring twice against last season’s Champions League runners-up, Tottenham Hostpur, at the AMEX Stadium before hopping on the plane to Georgia. Unfortunately, he only gave him 11 minutes, explaining afterwards that “when you’re at the last 10 or 12 minutes, somebody who comes on like that can run in behind. If he’d started he might not have been the same”. Which is a fair enough thought-process, but you can expect to be quizzed afterwards about why Ireland’s most in-form goalscorer was only given 11 minutes in a game we desperately needed to win.

Connolly did start the 0-2 defeat to Switzerland a few days later, a game which meant nothing for Ireland in the greater scheme of things. On a wretched night for the away side, particularly in the first-half, Connolly was a bright spot. He held the ball up well during the opening 15 minutes and gave his side a welcome foothold further up the pitch, drawing fouls from Elvedi and Lichtsteiner in the process. The latter resulted in James McLean slicing the ball out of play for a throw-in, from which the Swiss moved down slickly the field to open the scoring on 16 minutes. Afterwards, former Irish international Kevin Kilbane singled out the young man for criticism:

His lack of awareness on the pitch cost us the first goal…that is his relative immaturity in playing football…he didn’t get himself back into position quick enough, he allowed Xhaka to receive the ball when he should have been on him, he allowed Akanje to get out, and that’s what cost us the first goal ultimately.

Quite aside from the fact that the Swiss attack in question developed down James Collins’ side of the pitch and was facilitated as much by the retreating Irish midfield as anything the strikers did, singling out a 19 year-old centre-forward making his first senior international start for a defensive lapse in a game where Ireland were simply outclassed is typical of a certain attitude that has existed around the Irish senior team for some time. Just like Richie Sadlier had to qualify his praise of the Denmark performance by reminding us that the manager “can only work with the players that are there”, so Kilbane felt the need to castigate the most exciting young Irish talent to come along in some time for a lack of maturity. He’s 19! What, should we just drop him for three years then until he grows up?

I saw someone tweet in response: “If this is Connolly’s fault it’s no wonder we never play football“. Amen.

My suspicion is that McCarthy, like Trapattoni before him, has allowed the belief that individual Irish footballers are not good enough to play an ambitious brand of football to effectively limit what his players can achieve as a collective, and that approach has been facilitated every step of the way by large elements of the media. Denmark, for example, have been treated like an international super-power on the back of that 1-5 defeat in November 2017, a night when Ireland fell behind to a poorly-defended corner and a world-class finish, and O’Neill subsequently panicked and took off the entire central midfield nucleus. Otherwise, Ireland have now drawn five of their last six against the Danes, including all three away games. They hate the sight of us as much as we hate the sight of them, and for good reason. So why should Ireland have to set up so passively against them? Oh yeah, “limited resources“.

Those last 15 minutes against Denmark may at least provide some hope going to Slovakia. The manager himself recounted telling his players afterwards that “if we’re in a playoff, play like that and we win it”. I wholeheartedly agree. There is every chance that the Slovakians will ease to victory in four months’ time if Ireland go there with their tails tucked firmly between their legs. Taking the game to a team just two places above them in the world rankings is both possible and represents the best route to victory.

This isn’t about the players thinking they’re “better than people think” because of one performance. This is, to quote Bill Shankly, about football being “a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass”. Whether a manager is defensively-minded or otherwise, that really does remain the best way to achieve anything in this game, and these Irish lads are more than good enough to do it.

McCarthy’s job now is to get a performance out of his team in Slovakia that mirrors how they finished against the Danes. If injuries are kind to him between now and then, that should be eminently possible. Hopefully he won’t be left expressing puzzlement afterwards this time as to why his players didn’t pass the ball better. Once in a blue moon, as in Paris back in 2009, footballers will defy their manager to play a more expansive, ambitious brand of football because it’s the right thing to do. They rarely do it by kicking the ball out of play and giving it back to the opposition at every opportunity.

This is something that needs to be worked on, it needs to be drilled into these players that the risk of misplacing a pass is sometimes worth the reward of making a successful one. That comes from the manager and his vision of how the game should be played. These lads have already proven they can do it against a better team than Slovakia, albeit in a very small sample size. Whether or not McCarthy can extract another performance like that from the “limited resources” at his disposal remains to be seen, although I’m currently watching two top-half Premier League teams (Wolves and Sheffield United) with four Irish players starting between them, so perhaps those resources are a little bit less limited than they used to be? Matt Doherty has even scored. Again.

One thing is for sure: “the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass”, and the required philosophical calibration of the risk-reward matrix in order to make that work, is exactly the approach his successor will be taking. And perhaps the likes of me will finally have our proof that the manager’s methodology matters as much as the resources at his disposal when Stephen Kenny arrives, even if his immediate brief will be significantly tougher than his predecessor’s.

* * *

The expansion of the European Championship finals to include 24 nations prior to Euro 2016 has made qualification for the competition easier than it’s ever been, and a playoff place, well, that’s pretty much a piece of piss these days. 36 of UEFA’s 55 members were guaranteed at least a playoff for Euro 2020 (around two-thirds), and the first 19 nations eliminated from contention are drawn overwhelmingly from European football’s minnows, amongst them the likes of Andorra, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Kazakhstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova and San Marino. Some 44% of all UEFA nations will eventually make it to the finals tournament itself.

This has been a boon for the smaller nations, of course. In 2016, Albania and Iceland qualified for a first major tournament, and Northern Ireland, Slovakia and Wales for a first European Championship. Hungary were back for the first time in 44 years, and 2008 hosts Austria also successfully navigated a European Championship qualifying campaign for the first time. Who wasn’t qualifying for that tournament? Well, Scotland managed it, despite taking 4 points from their meetings with Ireland. Martin O’Neill’s men ultimately navigated their way to a playoff win over Bosnia and Herzegovina, but all they had to do to get there was finish above the Scots (a nation that hasn’t qualified for a major tournament since 1998) and dear old friends Georgia and Gibraltar. Unlike our neighbours to the north, who won their group, the Republic wouldn’t have qualified in any previous era.

This time around, the Finns have already become the newest first-time qualifiers for a major international tournament, and they could conceivably be joined by a number of unlikely candidates, none more so than the eventual winner of playoff Path D: Belarus, Georgia, Kosovo or North Macedonia. Yes, you read that correctly: Georgia, despite finishing five points adrift of Ireland in the qualifying group, retain just as good a chance of making it to the finals. Between the UEFA Nations League and the various playoff paths, it does make you wonder whether there was any point to the group stages at all if you weren’t going in with intentions of automatic qualification.

When McCarthy was appointed back in November 2018, John Delaney stated that he “is setting out his stall to get us qualified for Euro 2020” while his pre-ordained successor, Under-21 boss Stephen Kenny, is “learning how international football works”. Yet it seems to me that Kenny could have similarly secured a playoff berth, by merely finishing above Georgia and Gibraltar, with his eyes closed, and he would have still had 16 months to learn international football before March’s date with destiny against Slovakia.

Hell, he may have even split Denmark and Switzerland while he was at it because, judging by what he has been doing with the Under-21 team, there is a good chance that he would have gotten more out of the senior players than McCarthy has. Having never previously qualified for the UEFA European Under-21 Championship, Ireland currently sit top of a group that includes Italy and Sweden, and they managed to finish fourth at last summer’s Toulon Tournament too, going out to eventual winners Brazil.

The decision to go for McCarthy as a safe, experienced pair of hands for the Euro 2020 qualifiers has robbed Kenny of a glorious opportunity to build his reputation at this level. Already there are questions being asked as to whether players almost exclusively based in England, many of whom will have received the bulk of their training in the academies of English clubs and who, in the case of the Irish-born ones, were likely gone over long before they ever made it near League of Ireland football, will have the necessary level of respect for a man whose entire managerial career, aside from a year with Dunfermline Athletic in Scotland, has been spent in the unglamorous surroundings of the Irish domestic game with Longford Town, Bohemians, Derry City, Shamrock Rovers and Dundalk.

My own belief is that players will get behind any manager if they believe in his methods, but results are what ultimately matter, and Ireland’s Euro 2020 group would have certainly afforded Kenny the opportunity to get a few good performances under his belt and implement his vision over the course of a full campaign. This is said with all due respect to Denmark and Switzerland, who may very well have finished ahead of Ireland regardless of the manager.

The difficulty for Kenny is that his first campaign will be the 2022 World Cup qualifiers, where his side will likely be third seeds in a group where only the winners progress automatically. This is a far more challenging task than simply finishing third in their Euro 2020 qualifying group, a competition where 36 of the 55 entrants were guaranteed a playoff berth versus 24 out of 55 for the World Cup (less than half).

Ireland will need to finish at least second to maintain their involvement beyond the group stage for the World Cup, and any playoff scenario would see them facing other second-placed teams in a four-team mini-tournament similar to Euro 2020 rather than third-placed ones. For context, based on the current campaign, that would mean facing the likes of Czech Republic, Portugal, Netherlands, Denmark, Wales, Sweden, Austria, Turkey, Russia and Finland as potential opponents rather than the likes of Slovakia, Northern Ireland and Bosnia, and Kenny’s team would have to beat two of them in order to progress to Qatar, potentially away from home. If Mick McCarthy thinks finishing above Denmark or Switzerland in a qualifying group “was always going to be an overachievement”, try having to win successive games in Rotterdam and Lisbon, or Moscow and Prague.

Not qualifying for Qatar shouldn’t be a major problem necessarily. It will be 20 years by then since Ireland made it to a World Cup, so it’s not like qualification should be seen as easily attainable. With only 13 places made available to UEFA out of 32, the big-guns of Germany, France, England, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Croatia and Portugal are more than likely to leave the rest of us fighting for scraps, and there are teams currently better-equipped than Ireland to do that, most notably the likes of Denmark and Switzerland (again), Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, Czech Republic, and so on.

I believe that Kenny is unlikely to guide Ireland to the World Cup in 2022 given the nature of the odds against him, but I have no doubt that Euro 2024 qualification will be attainable, and in the meantime promotion from League C of the UEFA Nations League will keep him busy. By 2026, the World Cup will have been expanded to 48 nations, and some of the reforms at underage level in Ireland may be bearing fruit. As mentioned, Kenny’s own Under-21 team currently has a real shot at qualifying for a first European Championship, and the Under-19s finished fourth in the big tournament last summer.

The fear I have is that failure to qualify will be seized upon as proof that the appointment of a League of Ireland man was flawed to begin with, and that we should go back to looking at individuals like Trapattoni, O’Neill and McCarthy to bring their particular form of “managerial genius” to bear on our “limited resources”. If you can get someone like Chris Hughton, a well-respected former Irish international whose name has been mentioned in the past, then great. But just because someone has managed in the top two divisions of English football or played for Ireland doesn’t automatically mean they’re right for this job. That kind of thinking gets you someone like Roy Keane, a man allegedly last heard calling Harry Arter “a wanker” and “a prick” for obeying the direction of FAI medical staff.

Essentially, it’s been ten years, three managers, millions of Euro, and a 100% turnover of the playing squad (bar Glenn Whelan) to arrive back at the same point: a manager who doesn’t believe that his players can survive, much less thrive, outside of the restrictive cocoon provided by his bleak tactical vision, the majority of supporters and media falling in line with that belief based on the notion of “limited resources” and cheerfully welcoming the safety net offered by the playoffs, and the team facing into a sudden-death scenario where the significance of any mistake is likely to be magnified by the lack of scope to rectify it.

The argument will inevitably be made that these managers have simply cut their cloth according to their measure, and that the successes they have delivered prove that they were right to do so. But what about the successes they could have had? Euro 2020 may yet turn out to be another case of “what might have been”; the excitement many of us feel towards Stephen Kenny is that, win or lose, we’ll never have to wonder about such matters on his watch.