Watching Damien Delaney the other night place the job of Irish football manager second in importance only to the Taoiseach in the grand scheme of things initially sounded like a pundit with his tie loosened a little too much, overreaching to make the type of statement that would land him at the top of a mediocre sports column. But cutting Delaney sufficient slack to get to the nub of what he meant, he has a point.
No entity in Irish sport moves the dial as dramatically as a successful football team. The GAA has its steady pulse throughout the year and the Irish rugby team has incrementally inched itself up the charts of public interest and affection since the turn of the century to the point it seemed possible that a victory in a World Cup quarter-final might bounce them to the top of the tree. But no one ever gets people out on the streets like the football team.
There was a spell at the beginning of their recent Euro qualifier at home to the Netherlands when the miasma of the past couple of years briefly cleared and the Irish tore into them. The Aviva was suddenly rocking. Thousands of viewers at home would have been brought back to the edge of their seats. For all the eye-rolling of the last while, the public at its heart always wills the Irish team to be better like no other national team we have. When they’re up, nearly all of us are up. And when they’re down …
By extension, the job of managing Ireland carries a level of expectation completely disproportionate to Ireland’s actual standing in global football. The concern this time round following Stephen Kenny’s departure was how Ireland’s freefall through the rankings and the work-in-progress sign on the door of the dressing room might impact potential interest in the job.
But the early shortlist at least retains the soap opera qualities of its predecessors. Lee Carsley and Chris Hughton are the sensible choices. Neil Lennon is the Martin O’Neill character. Roy Keane plays himself.
For Philippe Omar Troussier, the hipster tip happy to sell himself as the perfect fit in a few managerial races, see Gus Poyet this time. For the slightly down-at-heel former manager in England trying to jolt some life into his career again, read Steve Bruce. For the granddaddy manager looking to gear down from the pell-mell of frontline management ... read Steve Bruce.
It would be nice if the FAI, having choreographed Kenny’s leaving from miles off, had a plan in place, but even this sentence knows there isn’t a satisfactory way to write its way to that conclusion. The headlines of the past week about the make-up of chief executive Jonathan Hill’s pay packet and the FAI being called again before the Dáil’s public accounts committee give exactly the wrong impression at the wrong time. Meet the new FAI, same as the old FAI.
What it needs isn’t that radically different than what Kenny was trying to do. An interesting blog published last week by the journalist and coach Stephen Finn analysing the deepest, darkest numbers of Ireland’s past four qualification campaigns offered some instructive bottom lines.
Although there has been a gradual decline in points per game since the Euro 2018 qualifiers, and Ireland are conceding more goals in crunch matches and less likely to score against the top teams than they have been for years, other numbers suggest pursuing a manager to rip up the playing style isn’t necessary.
Ireland’s passing accuracy has improved steadily through the years, reaching 86% in the last campaign. Ireland averaged the highest number of crosses completed per game in the entire competition (7.88) and were sixth best at earning corners. When it came to average attempts on goal per game, Ireland were 17th, the highest ranking team that didn’t make the top three across all the groups.
Apart from improving their set-piece work at both ends and eradicating the individual errors currently hurting them, Finn’s analysis shows Ireland don’t need a perceived hard-nosed, win-at-all-costs non-football approach. The team need to get better at specific things. They need to hold their nerve. And they need a manager capable of rebuilding their self-belief and the team playing smarter, which should result in fewer dopey mistakes.
The FAI should also place value in Kenny’s wish to reinvent how Irish football was seen by others, and how Irish football viewed itself, and the feeling that Kenny was trying to plant trees he wouldn’t sit under in a way that previous managers never did. That earned him the most dignified send-off possible in the circumstances and offers a decent baseline for whoever follows him.
