By Shane Breslin
Being absolutely pasted in almost every area of the field was bad enough, but the Richard Dunne jersey situation was a shameful and humiliating episode for everyone involved in Irish football.
With an international manager earning multiples of almost all his counterparts in world football with the exception of Fabio Capello, one would think that we could afford a spare kit – one with the right numbers stitched to the back and front.
Instead, we got Richard Dunne, sent to the dug-out by the referee because of a bloody jersey after he skinned his face on the running track, jogging back onto the field in a numberless shirt.
It’s like something you might see down the park on a Sunday morning. But junior football clubs don’t actually need spare playing kits. International squads, supposedly the elite in world football terms, do.
Worse was to follow when referee Felix Brych decided that a jersey without a number just wasn’t satisfactory.
These are the kind of shenanigans which had Keano spitting fire in Saipan
Some frantic scrambling in the Irish dugout failed to yield a second number 5 shirt. What was going to happen? Would Dunne be forcibly substituted because we didn’t have the right jersey for him to play on? That possibility – a nightmare scenario given how central Dunne was to the backs-to-the-wall game to end all backs-to-the-wall games – momentarily arose when Brych made the “substitute” gesture with his hands.
Luckily, though, someone had a biro to hand, and a rudimentary “5” was scrawled on Dunne’s chest and back.
We wonder if Roy Keane, presumably sitting in a plush pad somewhere in rural England mulling over a fat contract to manage a team of hopeless Icelanders, allowed himself a smile?
These are the kind of shenanigans which had Keano spitting fire in Saipan.
Almost a decade on, has anything changed? Is the organisation still as bad as it was when Keano watched Steve Finnan turn his ankle during a training session without proper equipment on a car-park of a training pitch in the mid-Pacific?
Or is it just that, with so much of the FAI’s cash being splurged on a ridiculously fortunate seventy-something-year-old Italian – ridiculously fortunate in terms of both miracle results like today in Moscow and the six-figure cheque that nestles into his bank account every month – we just can’t afford spare playing gear any more?
Dwindling revenue streams
After all, revenue streams have been dwindling for years because of the disaster of the so-called Vantage Club and the lack of interest among Ireland’s sports-loving public in a team which chronically bores opposition and supporters alike into submission.
Apparently John Delaney, the FAI chief executive, was spotted throwing his tie into the crowd at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow.
That appeared to be a celebratory gesture after the team got out of jail with an obscenely lucky 0-0 draw to keep alive our hopes of Euro 2012.
But maybe all was not what it seemed. Maybe he merely found a buyer. A tenner, after all, will go some way towards buying some spare gear for two more qualifiers next month.
Joking aside, though, whether the jersey-gate episode was prompted by lack of organisation or lack of money, seeing Richard Dunne finish a heroic performance beneath a scribbled No 5 was an embarrassment.
People like him deserve better.
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